Love Like the Falling Petals

A relatively naive and slyly manipulative attempt at a tear-jerker that doesn't forge hot steel with an impeccable first half only to boil with water that has long since evaporated from the pot. The narrative doesn't waste time on Haruto and Misaki getting to know each other, and it quickly flips in an unpleasantly suspect manner through the first wild images, which will hardly overwhelm audiences saturated with Japanese cinema (or the uninitiated, most likely) with its inventiveness and use of metaphor/experience. Despite some noteworthy foreshadowing, which my romantic self didn't mind at all, I wished that this part could have been prolonged substantially (note: It's almost unbearably ironic that the relativity and evenness of the time sequences of the two halves is woefully out of balance with the rub of the film). After all, it wouldn't be the Japanese if they didn't pour not a dash but a full demijohn of emotion into it, and so I was sorry they didn't take a clear opportunity to maximize the happiness of the characters, and the audience on the receiving end, so that the subsequent dramatic impact would be all the more crushingly effective. The whole time you can see clear from the moon what the director was trying to accomplish, but in my opinion they missed the target by the distance of Pluto and made the second hour drag excruciatingly slowly for the filmmakers, the actors, and above all the audience. The hitherto passable script completely crumbles, the characters start acting downright unnaturally; I truly hate it when a simple and obvious solution is thrown away to create an artificial island of disaster. Ultimately, the relationship between the main characters is bitterly unrealistic, and the final showdown left me shrugging my shoulders. It's a great shame, because the potential was enormous and its skillful exploitation would certainly have left me emotionally destroyed. I have no complaints about the actors, cinematography, or music. The disappointment that’s filling me up inside won't let me go higher than a very shabby 3 stars. (28/03/2022)