Featuring a rich, layered text, Koji Fukada The Real Thing delivers a singular and subversive love story that offers a lively and biting critique of the repression intrinsic to Japanese social order and the pernicious effects it can place on the individual and collective psyche. Wonderfully unraveling with a sense of unease and emotional effectiveness at how it captures affection and longing, The Real Thing exhibits an acute understanding of the pervasive nature repression has placed on the collective identity of Japan, subtle in the way it details the strife it causes as it permeates throughout various facets of society. What begins as what almost amounts to a quirky love story about a boy seeking a sense of adventure and the oddball woman he can't seem to forget quickly transforms into a layered story of trauma, one that offers a grandiose, provocative critique of Japanese society and its inability to confront the toxicity it creates through its avoidance of social conflict, personal pain, and emotional honesty. The Social performance intrinsic to Japanese society, the external persona vs. the internal struggle - This obfuscation of pain or trauma feels very much a central theme of The Real Thing. Whether it be general mental health, the subservience of femininity to masculine desire, or how fragility itself is perceived as pejorative, the repression of trauma both physical and mental is of major significance throughout The Real Thing which elucidates how this order and stability projected by collective expectation is largely a mirage that restricts social healing and the acceptance of the struggle that is day-to-day living. Neglect of feeling for the sake of production. Emotions can often be illogical, affect painfully unquantifiable, yet they are paramount to our sense of being. The tropes of the modern romance film are repositioned and wielded with great utility, suggesting that the impulse towards love, the self-sacrifice it entails is by definition illogical, being in a sense at odds with the Japanese expectation of stoic production but absolute paramount to our internal desire for connection. A complex, wonderfully distinctive work that is masterfully told, The Real Thing is emotionally resonant and intellectually rigorous, a film which I can't imagine I won't return to repeatedly as it's ripe with subtext worthy of continuous investigation.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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