First Love (Hatsu-Koi) (Screen Daily Review)

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First Love (Hatsu-Koi) (Screen Daily Review)

Postby dleedlee » Fri Jun 30, 2006 4:03 pm

First Love (Hatsu-Koi)

Jonathan Romney in London 29 June 2006

Dir: Yukinari Hanawa. Jap. 2006. 114mins.
Teenage rebellion, social history and true crime merge together in tenderly anaemic fashion in First Love, based on a quasi-autobiographical novel by Misuzu Nakahara. The first feature in 10 years by Tokyo Skin director Yukinari Hanawa, First Love has struck a slight chord with audiences in Japan – where it was released this month– for its reference to a notorious theft in the 1960s, and also for the lead presence of popular young actress Aoi Miyazaki (best known at home in from local success Nana and outside Japan from Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka).

But the consistently soft tone, and the failure to find a distinctive voice either as social reminiscence or as heist story, will make this an unlikely export. First Love has its international premiere at Karlovy Vary (Horizons) next week.

The film is inspired by Japan’s so-called 300 Million Yen Affair. In December 1968, a fake motorcycle policeman stopped a car carrying a huge amount of money belonging to the Toshiba corporation; neither the money nor the policeman was ever seen again, and the unsolved case was officially closed in 1975. In her novel First Love, writer Misuzu Nakahara claimed that she was the robber.

The young Misuzu (Miyazaki) is a lonely schoolgirl from a troubled family background, who starts to haunt the B bar, in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, where a gang of disaffected youths hang out drinking and listening to jazz: the reason this gauche young thing is accepted by these hardcore hipsters, we later learn, is because moody ringleader Ryo is Misuzu’s estranged brother (he’s played by the actress’s own brother Masaru Miyazaki).

Misuzu falls under the spell of Ryo’s enigmatic, seemingly straight-edged friend Kishi (Koide), who inveigles her into a plan to overthrow Japanese society (the story takes place against the background of Japan’s 1960s student radicalism).

Misuzu is to be accomplice in the Toshiba heist – and she’s required to pull it off single-handed. She rises to the occasion with aplomb, but as soon as it’s carried off, she and Kishi stop seeing each other, and Misuzu falls into further depression as the old gang falls apart.

First Love is quite specific about political and social signposts of late 1960s Japan – the narrative spans from 1967 to 1969 – and is economical with its scene-setting, never going overboard to give its characters an obviously retro look. But narratively, the film is a damp squib, building up gradually to the heist itself – which is concisely executed – but then reverting to uneventful moodiness, with much time devoted to showing the delicate ingenue Miyazaki wafting moodily around, as Misuzu heads for decorous meltdown.

The film’s conclusion would seem to be that crime doesn’t pay – although it might have been interesting to have some sense of how the real-life Misuzu Nakahara made her crime fantasy pay by spinning the robbery into a novel years later.

The film’s title has an ironic ring, given that the lovers’ attraction is only ever consummated in a crime which Misuzu commits solo. The film certainly doesn’t deliver as any kind of conventional romance, and even as an introspective ‘sentimental education’ story, it provides little psychological or emotional insight into its heroine.

The direction is polished but impersonal, and a distinct minus is the slushy score by Japanese composers COIL (not to be confused with the UK experimental act of the same name).

Production companies
Gaga Films
Micott & Basara
An Entertainment

International sales
Gaga Communications

Executive producers
Shinya Kawai
Yuka Hoshino

Producers
Shigeo Minakami
Shusaku Matsuoka

Screenplay
Yukinari Hanawa
Harumi Ichikawa
Tetsuro Kamogawa
from the novel by Misuzu Nakahara

Cinematography
Junichi Fujisawa

Production design
Iwao Saito

Editor
Nobuko Tomita

Music
COIL

Main cast
Aoi Miyazaki
Keisuke Koide
Masuru Miyazaki
Rena Komine

http://www.screendaily.com/story.asp?st ... 844&r=true
???? Better to light a candle than curse the darkness; Measure twice, cut once.
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dleedlee
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