JFF16 - Love Strikes!

モテキ Hitoshi Ōne, 2011

First film up, chosen purely for the reason that I wasn’t rostered on to do any volunteering this night. Love Strikes! is an adaptation of a Manga and TV drama series (surprise, surprise) about thirty year old Yukiyo Fujimoto. A typical slacker/loser/man-child who has zero skills with the ladies. The film follows the commencement of his “Moteki” a Japanese slang word that refers to a time in one’s life in which you receive a surge of interest from the opposite sex. The awkward and self loathing Fujimoto finds himself suddenly surrounded by women and does his best to navigate his way through this terrifying new chapter of his life.

Fujimoto’s pop-philosophical voice over tirade gets the film off to a strong start. His musings on famous quotes about love, as well as himself and his failings are fast, funny and intelligent, and are a welcome element through the film. It is his bouncing between rapid-fire antics and depressed moping that drives this film, and actor Mirai Moriyama has really got his pathetic self-deprecation down pat. Fujimoto is at his most interesting when he is thrown into awkward situations, whether it be with his vast array of work-mates (a great supporting cast) or awkwardly cracking onto a girl, it was great fun to see whether he would sink or swim. Scratch that, it was great fun to see him sink. Often.

Sex comedy tropes including drunken nights out, misunderstood text messages, sleazy bosses and awkward sexual encounters give this film some genuinely funny Judd Apatow style moments, while also remaining grounded in a very contemporary setting. Social media, particularly Twitter is the communication method of choice and source of many a joke (“You have 34,000 tweets but only 3 followers??”), and characters frequent music festivals and work jobs writing for blogs and websites while managing their online identities. This representation of hip young things with minimal responsibility was something I haven’t seen a lot of in Japanese movies (J-Dramas aren’t my thing) and gave this film a certain freshness for me.

Given its youthful characters and modern setting, music also plays a big role in the film, just as it does in many American rom-com equivalent films like Reality Bites or even 500 Days of Summer (Yuck). Fujimoto’s favourite tracks are waiting on his iPhone to comfort him, the character of Rumiko frequents Karaoke alone, and I was pleasantly surprised at the inclusion of a full song and dance number by Perfume, the one J-Pop band that DOESN’T make me want to go Reservoir Dogs on my own ears. In fact, idol groups are critiqued in a hilarious scene where the rejected Fujimoto regains his confidence after listening to J-Pop girl bands on YouTube. Another character derides him for his ignorance, explaining that the sugary lyrics are written for the sole purpose to fool idiots like him into confessing their love. Little moments like this strengthen the script and really deliver on the laughs, but the most successful comedic device is the use of karaoke style lyrics superimposed onto the screen. An ordinary scene is transformed into one of those terrible slow motion video clips that accompany karaoke. This is an ingenious gag that is used to great effect on more than one occasion.

Unfortunately, all the things that make this film so funny and enjoyable are almost completely absent from the second half of the film. You can almost pinpoint the exact moment when well written comedy is replaced for clichéd melodrama and laughs are replaced with tears. It was like watching a completely different film! Characters I had been enjoying became repulsive, and a film I had been regularly laughing out loud in became a dreadful chore. By the end, I really didn’t care who ended up with who or how they got there. Some might argue that it was just logical character development, but for me it was more like character regression. The karaoke gag doesn’t make a comeback, fun pop culture references are discarded, and the film meanders around in circles until it finally reaches its very unsatisfying and predictable conclusion. I was quite dumbfounded actually. Where did the tongue-in-cheek song and dance scenes go? Was the first half the funny half; the second half the serious?

It’s a shame that a film that could be so fun could so quickly become so painful. Director Hitoshi Ōne surely faced challenges cramming an extended manga/drama story into a shortened form, but by cramming all the good stuff in the first half, he just dropped the ball. I ended up having trouble sitting through it, wishing the overly long two hour run time would hurry up and wrap already. There is lots of stuff to like here, but it’s unevenness makes this quite a mixed bag, unfortunately.