2023 JAPAN CUTS: FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM REVIEW!
Amiko (Aira Sunohara) is just a girl in high school. Her life isn’t interesting, she doesn’t do anything exciting, and she’s obsessed with a boy, Aomi (Hiroro Oshita). While her life doesn’t really change, it sometimes feels like it’s spiraling out of control, like the things that she fears most in the world are coming to get her. She, like millions of other teenagers around the world, is full of angst, pain, and self-deprecating humor. She’s just like everyone else, and yet she seems to be one in a million.
Amiko isn’t supposed to be abundantly interesting–at least I don’t think so. I don’t think viewers are meant to look at her and see her much differently than they see the rest of the population. She has goals, fears, obsessions, and her humor often pokes fun at herself. On some level this is brilliant. It allows viewers to see her and think of people in their lives–it allows them to appreciate her and her purpose in the grand scheme of Amiko. On the other hand, however, I’m not sure that she’s interesting enough to warrant an entire film about her. I’m not sure that she’s capable of carrying a story from beginning to end, and she desperately needed help to drive the film forward from time to time. There’s a strange juxtaposition that exists throughout Amiko, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s intentional.
Sunohara is quite charming, all things considered. I don’t love the character, but she’s a cute kid that, had the character been written differently, would have likely won over the hearts of viewers. As an actor, I think she has what it takes to appeal to viewers, and potentially what it takes to help develop an entire story–but Amiko doesn’t necessarily afford her this opportunity.
The film itself, much like the titular character, isn’t much to talk about. There are a lot of times when it felt like background noise, like the film hadn’t ever developed into anything of substance. I felt bored, frustrated, and on occasion, like I could have fast forwarded through most of Amiko and not have missed anything. Again, like Amiko herself, I believe this is all done intentionally as a way to hold a mirror up to the world around us. Crazy things don’t happen to us each and every day (at least not to most of us), and Amiko is representative of this reality. There are parallels between Amiko and the story, and again a juxtaposition exists that might have been unintentional, and it’s definitely ineffective.
I feel like I’m beating a dead horse, like the things I’m saying are getting repetitive–but I’m struggling to find words to accurately represent how I feel about Amiko, and I didn’t find the film entertaining. I wondered if there could have been more to this film at some point, if part of the film’s appeal was stripped from it before it ever went into production (or even if some more interesting things made their way to the chopping block). While the story itself isn’t massively entertaining, and Amiko isn’t enough to drive the film, I ultimately think that it’s the pacing that causes the film to struggle. I can’t chalk my boredom up to Amiko not being the best character or the story lacking some things that could have made it better–and what I keep coming back to in my head is the pacing. Amiko could have and should have been a short film–and just as much would have been accomplished.
Written & Directed by Yôko Yamanaka.
Starring Aira Sunohara, Hiroro Oshita, Maiko Mineo, etc.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐½/10
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