| Nov. 10th, 2004 @ 01:13 am Film Review |
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Current Mood:  impressed
Current Music: AYA - baghdad sky
Movie: "Deep Love: Ayu no Monogatari [Gekijouban] (Deep Love: Ayu's Story [theatrical edition])"
Year: 2004
Format: .avi DVD rip raw (no subs)
Based on: The cell-phone epic novel by YOSHI.
Plot: "What..is happiness?" 17-year-old Ayu engages in enjo kosai (compensated dating) to make money, letting men use her body for her profit...until she meets one old woman by chance, changing her life forever.
Review: I've been keeping up with the manga scanlations online (from eden), and managed to find a used copy of the novel at my local Japanese used bookstore. I was immediately engrossed by the plotline, as the problem of enjo kosai really interests me. This is the infamous world's first novel to be distributed by celluar phone internet servers - in 2000, author YOSHI invested 1,000$ But seeing it finally put to film really really enhances the impact of this story. I don't think that I've cried this hard over a film for a long time. SHIGEIZUMI MIKA as Ayu is totally fantastic in her acting debut -- I don't think that YOSHI could have picked a better Ayu for this movie (out of the 1000 that auditioned). Her portrayal of Ayu seems to jump right out of the novels - apathetic, self-hating, and absolutely agonizingly beautiful. As for LEAD's Furuya Keita as Yoshiyuki, the jury's still out on whether someone else could have also played that role just as well. I wasn't really feeling his performance next to Shigeizumi's. Though, YOSHI had a point about Furuya's eyes - they're very soulful and seemed to contain the essence that was Yoshiyuki from the novel. A bit of a moot point?
My complaints of the movie are not many. I feel that they should have expanded more about Ayu's diagnosis of AIDS -- it was too suddenly delved into for my taste, and it kind of left me confused until AFTER it is verbally said in the film that Ayu dies of AIDS. But again we must consider the time constraints, which probably helped motivated YOSHI to do the drama, now airing on TV Tokyo (under the same name, same actors, but longer), to do what he couldn't in the movie. As I haven't seen the drama yet (in the process of getting it from WINMX), I can't make any comparisons, but I can say that the film does stay VERY faithful to the novel, which is rare these days with book-into-film projects. I would like to work on doing subs for this movie for a wider distro, but until I get more time, I probably won't be able to. I thus encourage everyone that can survive without subtitles to see this movie -- it'll definitely change the way you think about Japan, sex, and teenagers.
Other formats: ongoing cell phone chapters distributed from internet servers via carriers DoCoMo and others, three print novels compiled from the cell phone chapters, three volumes of manga, drama so far totaling 9 episodes (ongoing).
Official website: http://www.zazn.net |
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