Last Updated on September 30, 2020 by rob
Meeting by chance, office worker Miyata (Yasuhi Nakamura) and homeless Maki (Reika Kirishima) may have found in each other the perfect partner. But whether they can make a go of it depends on Miyata’s manipulative former girlfriend Ayumi (Yuka Itaya), a private detective and former schoolmate of Miyata’s named Kando (So Yamanaka), who’s been doing some checking into Ayumi’s past, plus a Yakuza mobster named Asai (Kisuke Yamashita) who would quite like the cash stolen from his safe returned to him along with the thief who did it – a certain Ayumi.
An amusing and smartly plotted romantic comedy-drama reliant on one of those chain-of-coincidence structures that keeps flashing back to a series of pivotal events seen from different perspectives and which for once plays as neither overly contrived nor gimmicky. Writer/director Uchida uses the missing cash as a sort of ethical testing ground for his characters whilst evincing a sharp and not unsympathetic eye for the contrast between a character’s public image and their private one. The flashbacks adopt the ‘One Chapter/One Character’ structure familiar from Tarantino films and are often uproariously funny.
They’re matched by the dexterity with which the film switches effortlessly between a sweet indie-style romance (Kirishima as the jilted fiancee is downright heartbreaking in the film’s early scenes) to a detective story and then a gangster number. Finally coming full circle as Maki discovers the cash (Uchida at his most playful here, going for a downbeat ending before winningly rewinding the closing credits to give us the happy ending we all want, although even here inserting an uproarious gag set up in the film’s opening sequence that’s a direct homage to Wilder’s The Apartment, this is a delight from start to finish. Incidentally, Uchida would revisit this idea of a string of coincidences propelling strangers into each others lives at greater length and with added star power in 2012’s Key Of Life. I highly recommend both movies.
