Love is anything but simple in this hard to watch, controversial drama based around forbidden love.
In 1993, the Japanese tsumani strikes Okushiri leaving 10 year old Hana without a family. A chance meeting with 26 year old ‘distant relative’, Jungo (Tadanobu Asano) means that Hana isn’t without hope in the world as Jungo takes her in. Skip to 7 years later, and Hana (Fumi Nikaido) is settled into her new life and in High School, but there’s something off and strange about her. Equally, we begin to notice there’s something a bit ‘too close’ about her relationship with Jungo, and it soon becomes apparent the two have embarked on a tabooed romance.
My Man is a tricky watch. Be prepared for awkward, uncomfortable scenes which leave you wanting to vacate the room until the excruciatingly long first ‘session’ is over with, followed by the plot losing itself a little and getting quite annoying. We see it from the point of view of our main protagonist, Hana, and her unwavering romantic advances towards her guardian. Hana is clearly a young, curious teenager, damaged from her past and it spills out into the love affair. She also shows signs of a damaged woman, far beyond her years. Acting like a middle-aged house wive awaiting the arrival of her husband from sea only to have him for a few days before he embarks on another adventure. She takes such actions like a committed wife, and this is where the signs begin to crack to suspecting parties that there’s more than meets the eye in this relationship.
It’s a daring story and successful in it’s own right, but not one you can ever really settle into watching as it leaps from the disturbing relationship (credit must go to the actors for making it this way) to some outright strange plot twists that never really get explained, leaving you with an unsatisfying and mystifying ending.
Fumi Nikaido is fantastic in the role of 17 year old Hana as she skips between ‘crazy bitch’, which lets be fair, is quite understandable given her history, and a young teen in love and unable to understand what’s so wrong with that. Of course we know why and that means all of our ill feelings are hurdled towards Tadanobu Asano who masterfully plays a fine line between creepy and sympathetic, but ultimately creepy.
My Man isn’t for the faint-hearted and a lot of the Japanese metaphorical meanings could get lost on you, such as they were with me. The premise is there, but along the way the train’s carts seem to slowly fall off the track one by one, leaving quite a hollowed experience.
Rating: A film that had a lot of promise but ended up losing itself by the second hour, (5/10).
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