This is a comfortable film, about the good love of two ordinary young people, who have romantic moments, are consumed by time, and end realistically but decently. No party is a sinner in the relationship. In the trivialities of life and the struggle of work, feelings are not even so important.
This article was first published in Southern People Weekly
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The screenwriter of the 2021 phenomenal Japanese film "Bouquet of Love" is Yuji Sakamoto, which has overshadowed its director Yutai Doi in the fan circle. Since 1991's Tokyo Love Story, Yuji Sakamoto's screenwriting works have penetrated the hearts of Japanese film fans. He is good at depicting feelings that cannot end well: four or five people in "East Love" are emotionally entangled, and the characters in "Quartet" (2017) are almost all unrequited. "The Most Perfect Divorce" (2013) focuses on married people, as the Douban Top Praise Review puts it, about "the kind of resentment that accumulates day after day, the pain of indivisible belt meat".
The protagonist of "Bouquet of Love" is a four-year relationship between a young man, Yamato Mai and Yatani Silk.
They missed the last train to meet, excited by their encounter with Oshii Mori at an izakaya, and together despise the "movie fans" who like "Witch House Rush" and "The Shawshank Redemption". They like the same writers and wear the same little white shoes. They all hate the headphone cables that come together. They have ticket stubs for the same show in their wallets. They all don't understand: why can stone scissors brie, cloth win over stone?
"I met people who thought the same thing as me." They all want to. They intend to confess on the third date. They fell in love, lived together in a small house with a view of the river, and kept a cat together. They stood on the balcony, and Shan Yinmai said that his life goal was to live like this with Eight Grain Silk for a lifetime.
Yuji Sakamoto used many musical video game symbols to show how much the two were very sharp. The film is two hours long, and how close the couple is in the first hour, and how strangling their passion fades in the next hour.
The cohabitation hut as a space shows the beginning of the estrangement between the two: after graduation, Yatsuya Silk found a job before Yamato Mai, one of them reads in the living room, the other anxiously submits his resume in front of the computer in the study, and in the same shot, the two are placed in different small spaces. Their pace of life began to be inconsistent.
But beyond that, the film doesn't have a brilliant shot language or elaborate structure. Its cinematography can be said to be lackluster. Occasionally, narrations from Shanyin Mai or Eight Grain Silk appear, depicting the mental activity of their respective perspectives, like diaries; like diaries, there are structures with time nodes as strings, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.
Both parents put pressure on them to live an ordinary, orderly life. It's not easy. Shan Yin Mai wanted to be an illustrator, after bowing to life, he put down his paintbrush, changed from Wenqing to a diligent social animal, undertook the double workload and performance, social pressure at the same time, gradually lost the sensitivity to various art forms, can only rely on the elimination of similar games to decompress.
At the bookstore, Yatsuya buys a new literary journal and sees Yamao Mai reading the success book "Odds of Life". The main creator next piled up many daily scenes: Shan Yin Mai missed the re-screening of "The Juvenile Murder Incident on Muling Street" and missed the drama re-rehearsal. The senior died, and the two missed the opportunity to talk deeply after the funeral.
"The beginning is the beginning of the end." When the relationship began, The narrator of Yakuya Silk had such an exclamation, and then it was true. They no longer have the desire to communicate and be intimate, one of whom thinks it is important and the other no longer agrees. As one of their friends in the film said, the shelf life of love has passed, and it is as tasteless as passing the ball around repeatedly. Their feelings were like fresh bouquets withering.
Both realized that the good was only the memories of the past. The scene is good: Shan Yin Mai vaguely wants to mention the breakup, and Hachiya Silk says, thank you. Shan Yin Mai regretted it at this time and said, "Let's get married." "Couples who are married in this world will slowly forget the feeling of being in love. Aren't there also people who continue to live like this after getting married? "But Yagyu said that you would only say such things because you were happy today."
But I think the next paragraph is a bit deliberate to the point of vulgarity - in the restaurant where they are dating, a small couple diagonally is like they were then: wearing the same small white shoes, exchanging books they are reading, chatting about common hobbies, sparks splashing between conversations, and the two of them listen to all this, sad and tearful.
If you remove the above paragraph, I think "Bouquet of Love" ends well: after the breakup, they meet in the café, each with a new partner, two couples walk out of the café and walk in two directions, Eight Grain Silk and Shan Yin Mai two people back to back, waving.
There are many literary and artistic works that tell the story of broken feelings, and this movie is not new. Some viewers believe that this is "the inevitable disillusionment of men and women who indulge in imagination and symbols after falling into the order of reality." Others argue that writers and directors are too conservative to touch on the real social obstacles that a relationship will encounter.
I personally don't think it's necessary to give it such high value expectations. This is a comfortable film, about the good love of two ordinary young people, who have romantic moments, are consumed by time, and end realistically but decently. No party is a sinner in the relationship. In the trivialities of life and the struggle of work, feelings are not even so important.