Time, and Time Again
It’s March, so that means it’s time for more time-travelling romantic highjinks. I guess.
First Kiss
Director: Ayuko Tsukahara • Writer: Yuji Sakamoto
Starring: Takako Matsu, Hokuto Matsumura, Riho Yoshioka, Nana Mori, Lily Franky
Japan • 2hrs 4mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 27 • I
Grade: B-
It’s a busy year for journeyperson television director Ayuko Tsukahara. At home in Japan, her film adaptation of the Takuya Kimura food series, Grand Maison Paris, hit screens in November. Her latest aggressively sun-dappled soft-focus trifle, First Kiss | ファーストキス 1ST KISS, landed in January. Here in the Fragrant Harbour we’re getting the Ayuko Tsukahara Film Festival this week. And you know what? The two films could make for a solid, semi-fluffy, if slightly confused double bill. In a way both are about regrets, exploiting chances for do-overs and taking control of your life, though First Kiss leans harder into its tragic romance trappings, shading it with a little time travel hoo-hoo. We told you Tsukahara’s first film, Cafe Funiculi Funicula, would be important.
Hero and Confessions star Takako Matsu plays Kanna Suzuri, a designer of some kind, who we meet in the months – perhaps days or years, it’s never clear – after her husband Kakeru (Hokuto Matsumura, All the Long Nights) dies in a gorgeously realised and terrifying to any urban dweller transit accident (second to Vincent D’Onofrio’s demise is the stellar “Subway” episode of Homicide: Life on the Street – find it). The odd thing is that Kanna and Kakeru had grown irreparably distant over the course of their 15-year marriage and were on the verge of divorce when he died. To say Kanna is conflicted over her feelings is an understatement. But this is a time travelling, vaguely rom-com fantasy, so when part of a Tokyo road tunnel closes for repair, Kanna accidentally winds up on another road (I think) that takes her to a small town hotel resort 15 years earlier where she and Kakeru first met. If this is your hokey jam, strap in.
The action starts with Kanna alone in the Tokyo flat she shared with Kakeru, his shrine in an unused guest room that she only sees when she goes in to fetch a lightbulb or something. After royally fucking up some gyoza she ordered online three years earlier (idiocy or prophecy?) she gets called back to the theatre she works at to handle a design emergency. En route she runs off the road, for reasons, and emerges from the tunnel 15 years earlier in summertime and quickly realises she’s out of time. Now, the admirable thing about these movies – both versions of My Missing Valentine, Jill Leung’s Last Song for You come to mind – is that there’s no time wasted on characters suspecting, gathering evidence and proving to others they’re moving through time. It just is. Not every movie needs disbelievers and I’m fine with this. So Kanna realises what’s happening and, despite the state of their relationship when he died, she decides to keep going back to this one day to change Kakeru’s fate, be it one with her or without her. She tries to ensure he impresses a professor, Ichiro Tenma (Lily Franky), in order to give Kakeru a shot at his dream career in palaeontology, and possibly also Tenma’s daughter Ritsu (Riho Yoshioka, Ice Cream Fever). Ritsu fancies Kakeru, and in Kanna’s mind if he marries her instead, maybe he lives.
Earlier when I said “slightly confused” I was 100% referring to the tone and construction of First Kiss. Yuji Sakamoto’s script dances around the conundrums expected of a film like this: Can Kanna really fight fate? Are they destined to be together no matter what? If we can’t fight fate can we at least alter it? Kanna grabs onto her chance for a do-over with an iron fist but should she? Should any of us? It’s all very bittersweet and it could more so if Sakamoto – who penned Hirokazu Kore-eda’s so-so Monster and Nobuhiro Doi’s We Made a Beautiful Bouquet – had trimmed the narrative fat and devoted himself to consistency. The first 30-odd minutes do a lot of foundation laying, and once that’s done Kanna’s adventuring and tweaking kick into gear and it looks like the comic froth is about to spill over. But then in the second act it settles into a traditonal romance, with Kanna remembering the reasons she fell in love with Kakeru to begin with, and committing to saving him so they can start again (and messing with temporal mechanics in doing so, but that’s another movie). Sakamoto and Tsukahara bring back Kanna’s romantic rival just so she can shit all over a grieving widow. Odd storytelling choice, that. First Kiss does that thing so common in Japanese cinema where filmmakers conflate adorkability (is that still a thing?) with sucking at life. Seriously, how many times can a person trip on the street before everyone else just rolls their eyes and moves on? It has too many endings (naturally) and includes a museum fake-out that muddles the message about fate and free will. Taken together it all renders First Kiss technically polished instead of visually creative, average instead of charming, rote instead of even moderately challenging – but probably a comfy blanket for the soft touches among us.