Director: Kyohei Ishiguro
Year: 2021
Genre: Romance/Comedy
When watching this film at first, I was intrigued by its colours and visuals; however, when watching it, the story did not click with me.
Smile, a person who is famous online always wears a mask to cover her identity and Cherry, a bit introverted person, gets to know each other because they accidentally switched phones with each other.
At first, the story looked alright, but it felt like a chore when watching it. The two main characters lack in building the relationship from the start. Sure, they have a connection with each other but the relationship between the two does not connect, or how each of the characters manages to get each other to feel a lot more confident with each other. It feels like the characters lacked that background for people to know more about - it just feels like the story is lacking and the visuals are what makes the story look good.
Moving onto the narrative, the narrative is there, but it doesn't feel like it's well-defined. The film lasted for almost 90 minutes but I felt like the story dragged on for a while and there was no solution to the story. the narrative had a solid foundation - I'll give credit where credit is due - two characters who have their own problems in life. Ok, that sounds like a good start, but the journey or the way the two characters bond with each other is what is missing. The film is classed as a romance film but where was the romance? The romance felt like it was there but not finessed well enough. When watching it until the finish line, the ending was not a solution which was settled but felt like what was the story trying to tell us. There are many ways of telling a story in a film: one of the ways includes telling a story from A to Z, whereas, in other films such as Akira, where the narrative might look confusing, but at least the story is somewhat well-written but confusing; however, the audience is able to somewhat bring the pieces together.
To be honest, what saves the film is the visuals, but visuals alone can't save a film at times. Take Suzume for example, visuals I'll give it 9/10 but story 2/10. If the story was well-define to match with its colourful visuals, this film will be up there.
The film wanted to take that typical summer time film you would associate with, but the story did not like up to that expectation. The visuals are nice but the story was not well-defined and it lacked that finesse for the audience to be engaged with what's going on.
Rating: 1/10
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