From my notes taken at about the halfway point: "I hate that this movie went this way when there was a lot to like! It could still redeem itself but it has a lot of work to do..." Ah, me: the eternal optimist. The proof was in the pudding by then, but I just couldn't accept it.
The one sentence description for this film reads, "a fish-market employee doubles as a contract killer." A simple and intriguing lede, and all of those things are true. Rinko Kikuchi plays a mysterious lady-assassin named Ryu who is friends with an old man sound engineer (who doubles as the narrator) that likes to record the sound of her slurping ramen. That's fine. Now, about this sound engineer character... Where do I even begin? He records everything, SOMEHOW. There are scenes of him lying on the floor listening back to Ryu's exploits from the previous night. Beyond seeing him outside of a restaurant one time with headphones on, how he recorded any of this is never explained. We never see Ryu mic'd up or willingly allowing these extremely personal encounters recorded. And furthermore, as a character, his aural voyeurism serves no purpose whatsoever. The fucking title of the movie is a reference to this guy and his entire schtick not only makes no sense pragmatically, but serves NO PURPOSE to the story. What is the audience supposed to glean from listening back to scenes that they've just witnessed beyond the understanding that this is a thing that this weird guy likes to do? These recordings never come into play outside of the sound engineer's private world. A nameless, faceless narrator could have served the exact same purpose. Honestly, though, this guy is still ONLY the third most infuriating character in the story.
Like I says earlier, "a fish-market employee doubles as a contract killer?" I'm sold! I thought this was going to be a thriller with a sexy lady-assassin set in Tokyo. It feels like that at the beginning. But instead it devolves into a fairly boilerplate, if not weirdly pornographic, saccharine love story. If you're interested in seeing some fisting and face-sitting shot in the most tasteful way imaginable, then this is your film, baby. When Ryu is tasked with killing Sergi López (the evil captain from Pan's Labyrinth) for the crime of having dated a sad CEO dad's daughter (?), everything seemed so simple and pure. She would either kill him or not, and certain exploits from the past would reveal themselves to pepper the plot. But we don't get to see our contact killer kill anybody and beyond polishing and loading a gun early on, she doesn't engage in any violence or criminal activity whatsoever.
Lemme back up... the inciting incident is when sad CEO dad's daughter kills herself. He learns the news whilst dining on naked lady sushi, the most 2009 thing ever and also, perhaps not really a thing?
It's a pretty gruesome scene when they arrive he and his assistant arrive at her bathroom and the blood is still everywhere, including the mirror where she wrote (in blood): "WHY DIDNT YOU LOVE ME AS I LOVED YOU." Naturally sad CEO dad's assistant is tasked with cleaning this off, a normal thing that a CEO's assistant has to do...
Herein lies infuriating character #2: sad CEO dad's assistant (sad CEO dad is also a pretty bad character, but I'll give him a pass because his daughter just killed herself). It is so briefly implied, much later on in the film, that this guy either had a fling or infatuation with the daughter, or was at the very least sad CEO dad's preferred choice in suitor over the gringo wine mogul, Sergi López. But if you blinked, you likely missed this nugget. Don't worry: it's only intricately tied to "understanding" the end of the film. We'll get there.
So Ryu falls in love with her mark and pretty much abandons any notion of going through with killing the guy right away and they just have a weird, frustrating affair that is grossly over-sexual and honestly only the man's side of the equation is explored at all (he straight up tells her that he is thinking of his dead girlfriend when he fucks her). Sorry, but this is a bad look from writer-director Isabel Coixet–A WOMAN!–but there is zero depth to our lead character. Why is she (A) so cold and detached that she would choose to lead the life of "a fish-market employee who doubles as a contract killer" in the first place, and (B) why is she so quick to fall for this much older dude whose only real selling points are that he's a pervert and knows about wine? On both points, we get a big ole ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But by far the worst character in the film is one that might be the laziest instrument of exposition I've ever seen: Sergi López's wine shop assistant. This dude is in one scene earlier in the film where he exchanges some wine shop dialogue that is wholly inconsequential and instantly forgettable. However, he returns late in the film to have a heart-to-heart where, after being offered to buy the wine shop (?) he drops these bombs about his boss's dead ex-girlfriend....
W to the T to the F. Anyway, the sad CEO dad's assistant ends up shooting Ryu in the back in the middle of the fish market in broad daylight for the crime of having not fulfilled her contract killing and instead falling deeply in love with the mark, who we just learned actually did nothing whatsoever wrong in the first place (it was the dead ex-girlfriend's fault!). There is a postscript where we see the sound engineer guy cleaning some grave markers (don't ask) and Sergi López watching an Asian black-and-white erotic film with his new wife and baby just down the hall back in Spain. Again: NORMAL STUFF, I'M SURE. Totally normal movie over here, folks.
If this film wasn't confused enough, there is some meta-commentary about cinema itself thrown in as well...
...not to mention tree guy and these weird flash mob sequences...
...tree guy also returns, creepily, post-credits MCU-style to be creepy and perhaps act as a mocking metaphor for the 90+ minutes you've just wasted...
But honestly, I can't even hate on tree guy. I like tree guy. Anything to "break the silence" (?)...
....of this horrible movie. And if you're wondering why I awarded this a score of 2 instead of 1 or ZERO, first off, that's an excellent question, and secondly, Isabel Coixet definitely knows what she'd doing. The film looks good and none of the performances are glaringly bad. Take this lovely looking scene before things go to shit...
You would have to be a savant to realize you were watching a terrible movie at that point. That's not nothing. I have a soft spot in my heart for all things Japanese and was frankly excited that the GODS OF TRUE RANDOM chose this motion picture for me to watch. But that's the way the cookie crumble sometimes, and by cookie I mean novelty hotel rooms designed to look and feel like subway cars, and by crumble I mean the insertion of, don't say it, the fifth finger 🤮🤮🤮
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 310 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 312 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 310 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 312 ⫸
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