Drowning Love (Movie Review)

If you don't want to read this review, I'll save you the trouble: I want my two hours back. In short, I didn't like this movie. Having read the original manga, I knew what to expect, and the adaptation is nothing if not faithful. The story could be considered good, but the execution and horrible characters made it frankly impossible to watch. Alas, I've already committed to this, so here we go.

NOTE: Spoilers.

Drowning Love, or literally The Knife That Fell, is about child model Mochizuki Natsume who moves from Tokyo to  the small town of Ukigumo with her family. There, she is immediately taken with the town's bad boy, Hasegawa Koichiro, or "Kou-chan". He, too, feels an attraction to her, and the two soon begin to date. These two are torn apart on the night of the town festival, when Natsume is raped and Kou is powerless to help her. They break up, and time passes. The two appear to have moved on, but are haunted by the scars from their past.

I can appreciate that this film isn't a romantic-comedy, and that a happy ending was never guaranteed. This film is a dark and miserable melodrama (even though the posters are so bright and sunny you'd never guess). The basic bones of the story had the potential to become something chilling and brilliant, but in depth the film was confusing and frustrating.

  For starters, the main characters are weird. Their immaturity in the first half is a little more understandable, since their characters are younger then and should really have been played by younger actors).Considering the source material, I would say the actors did the best they could possibly do with their characters - Suda Masaki was wasted with the mystifying Kou, but managed to ground him somewhat. Although Komatsu Nana handled the emotional burden of her character incredibly well, she couldn't do anything about how bratty Natsume was written to  be. It was the second half of the film that frustrated me - the two just talked in circles until the film ended. How was I supposed to care about what happened to characters like this?

  The directing also left a lot to be desired, and I can pin-point it to a lot of the problems I had. The director probably thought they were being creative and artsy by frequently using establishing shots - which, admittedly, was new, but also meant that characters were sacrificed for the landscape and it was difficult to concentrate in those scenes. 

  Also, DEAR GOD, I wish they had been more sensitive with the rape scene. That was too much, and should have happened off-screen. 

  The directing was especially important in one of the last few scenes, as it would have provided clarification for what had happened, but it just made the scene even more confusing instead.

  But actually, one directing choice made me laugh so hard. They dedicated an incredibly long scene for the second-lead (who has super sweet and deserved better than Natsume) horribly botching a song at karaoke. It felt ridiculously out of place, which amused me.

  The only thing I really liked about this film was the final scene, which gave grace and a bittersweet feeling to the conclusion of Drowning Love. Although frankly, it just made me think about how much better the film could have been. It wasn't awful, I guess, but it was messy. I think if it were more polished and thoughtful, it could have been a far more satisfying look at the human condition, and broken first love. Oh well. Let's just pray that the actors find better projects in the future.