Triple Threat
Takahiro MIki shoots the moon with not one, not two, but three life-altering tragedies in one romance. Deliver me!
Even if This Love Disappears From the World Tonight
Director: Takahiro Miki • Writers: Hana Matsumoto, Sho Tsukikawa, based on the novel by Misaki Ichijo
Starring: Riko Fukumoto, Shunsuke Michieda, Kotone Furukawa, Honoka Matsumoto, Masato Hagiwara, Toru Nomaguchi, Maki Mizuno, Koki Maeda
Japan • 2hrs 1min
Opens Hong Kong December 8 • I
Grade: B-
What the fuck is going on in Japan? Why are its writers so miserable as to give us tome after tome after tome about inappropriate tragic romances and the most brazenly dysfunctional families ever? And why are readers consistently turning them, first, into runaway bestsellers, then audiences into box office monsters when the film adaptation invariably comes along? It’s been said the best insight into the national Japanese psyche is through its manga, but these soft focus romances are making a case for themselves, however dissonant the answers might be. By the standards of the form, and it is indeed a form now, Even if This Love Disappears from the World Tonight | 今夜、世界からこの恋が消えても goes out of its way to pile on the central heroine – and indeed it is almost always a “she” – giving her not only an illness that messes with her life, and will forever, it makes sure she only gets a whiff of a life in the moment.
Based on the 2019 novel by Misaki Ichijo – which Barnes & Noble categorises as YA, uh oh – and shot in sunny tones, with soft edges and peopled by flawlessly skinned youths by DOP Hiro Yanagida, the shooter on I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, about – wait for it – a teenaged girl with a terminal illness whose bucket list diary is the impetus for a tragic romance with a classmate. Needless to say, Even if This Love does its level best to live up to its misty forebears. Director Takahiro Miki has been down this road before, with Fortuna’s Eye, the fantastical romance (based on a book by Naoki Hyakuta) about an unhappy young man who can see when people are going to die and saves a pretty, equally awkward girl from death. You know what? Itemising these is giving me a headache. Plus I’m losing track.
Guess you can airbrush DCP
This time around, anmensia, terminal illness and a little harmless gaslighting come together in grand, gauzy, melodramatic fashion, starting with Maori Hino (television actor Riko Fukumoto, reuniting with her Love Me, Love Me Not director) getting up for school. She has no memory of the day before. She looks at the cues on sticky notes around her bedroom and reads the (paper) journal she religiously keeps to figure out her life every morning. Kind of like Guy Pearce in Memento, just with less personality. Turns out Maori was in a car wreck a few years earlier leaving her with anterograde amnesia and a fresh slate after every nap. Her best pal Izumi (Kotone Furukawa, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) and her parents are the only people who know about her condition, because reasons.
One day at school – Maori’s the class hottie of course – the vaguely emo Toru (Shunsuke Michieda of boy band Naniwa Danshi, if you couldn’t tell from the hair) asks her on a date, but only because his friend (who we never really see again and whose storyline vanishes) is being bullied. And to make it stop Toru musters ups the balls to ask Maori out? Blah blah, cycling, etc etc ice cream, yada yada fireworks, and Toru and Maori are in love despite vowing not to let that happen when he drops the bombshell on Izumi that he has the same congenital heart disease his dead mother did. Do you see where this is going? Of course you do. Oh, and Toru’s sister Sanae (Honoka Matsumoto) is a famous author. That’s important, becuase they gotta do something about Maori’s pesky journal!
At least it’s not a triangle
Sis, help me gaslight a gal?
Even if This Love is suitably dewy and ticks all the tissue boxes in its resolute march to its sniffly finale, which to the film’s credit has a whisper of bittersweet nuance to it, though neither Miki nor writer Sho Tsukikawa – director of Pancreas, and seriously just how big is this cottage industry? – bothered to explore the fleeting nature of both affection and memory in the lead up to the third hanky. Like most of its brethren Even if This Love is too long by at least 20 minutes, it’s more sturdy than creative, and the filmmakers erroneously conflate “run time” with “tension building,” and “boneheaded decisions” with “selfless romantic gestures” when those ideas are mutually exclusive. Still, fans of this stuff are as devoted (and possibly legion) as Marvelites, and so any complaints will fall on wilfully deaf ears. Hey, you’ll never convince me Dirty Dancing is anything other than a stealth feminist classics, so Godspeed. — DEK