In
a way, breaking up is also a form of commitment, because it will most likely
close one set of doors pretty definitely. Rinko and Isamu are not sure they are
ready for that. They called it quits six months ago, but they are still happily
living together. Obviously, this situation is not sustainable. When Isamu
finally starts to hesitantly explore a relationship with another woman, it
prompts great soul-searching on Rinko’s part in Shingo Matsumura’s Love and Goodbye and Hawaii (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 Japanese Film Festival of San Francisco.
Rinko
the office worker and Isamu the grad student are quite civilized about their
break-up. They had been living in his apartment, but given the cost of rent in
Tokyo and Rinko’s desire to save money for a friend’s destination wedding in
Hawaii, he quite reasonably let her stay on as a roommate. For a while, this
works out quite well. They still speed-walk together and eat out at
restaurants, but since they no longer have relationship stuff to worry about,
they no longer fight.
At
least, that is how things were for a while. When Kasumi, a pretty grad student
starts showing and interest in Isamu and he starts reciprocating, Rinko feels
threatened and inadvertently starts picking fights again. Before long, the
atmosphere gets so tense, she must finally move out, but she only has a friend’s
couch to temporarily crash on. As she deals with her near-homelessness and the
heartaches of her friend’s younger sister (and co-couch crasher), Rinko finally
faces up to her feelings and decides whether or not she will fight for Isamu.
Love etc is a deceptively
simple but distinctly Japanese movie. It is sort of what we might expect if Hirokazu
Kore-eda rewrote and remade a sappy break-up rom-com like Forgetting Sarah Marshall or the Vince Vaughn vehicle, The Break-Up. It is a quiet film, but
its emotions get rather messy and they will not necessarily be resolved to
everyone’s satisfaction.
In
fact, this is quite an unequal movie relationship, with Rinko getting
considerably more screen time than Isamu. She also seems to have more
complicated feelings and Aya Ayano expresses them all with delicately subtle
shadings. She makes all of Rinko’s flaws painfully clear, but we can also see
why she is so hard to break-up with. In contrast, Kentaro Tamura is rather
workmanlike as Isamu, but he has some nice moments expressing his passion for
Japanese literature. However, one of the film’s surprise pleasures is Momoka
Ayukawa, giving the film a slightly goofy, slightly saucy heart as the somewhat
romantically-challenged sister of Rinko’s friend.
