Masami Nagasawa, 17, is as beautiful as the summer vacation in her memory
On the eve of the typhoon, the tape of Shotaro's first love in high school was accidentally discovered by his fiancée, Noriko. Ritsuko leaves a note and runs away, while Shotaro goes out to look for it. He took the tape with him and found the location of his student days. A series of past events emerge from these old scenes, along with his first love, Agi, a girl who died of leukemia on the days of the typhoon.
The film uses the same scene in reality and memory as the intersection of the narrative. The reality part is not reduced to a foil for memories, but becomes a cathartic annotation of emotions, and it is also a sublimation of time and life. Recalling part of the warm yellow summer, and the cold and gray typhoon days in reality, forming an emotional color contrast.
Half of the film is after Yaji's illness, and the film shows Yaji's tombstone in the opening 30 minutes, so the film is not a romantic youth romance in the usual sense, but a slightly heavy movie, which also inserts the love story of the photo studio owner and the deceased principal, which also adds a heavy flavor to the film in a longer historical context. At the same time, the role of the owner of the photo studio is particularly exquisite, although there are not many words, the appearance is cold, he is the link between memory and reality, and he witnesses love, time and life and death with the camera.
At the end of the film, Shotaro and Ryoko arrive together in Uluru, Australia, the "center of the world" that Shotaro and Akiki once agreed to go to. In the golden sunlight, they scattered the ashes of the Subgeon in the wind.