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First Love 's blend of violence, comedy, and romance might seem disparate -- but for director Takashi Miike, it's just another wildly entertaining entry in a filmography full of them.

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‘First Love’ Review: Eluding Assassins With the Help of a Boxer

The prolific director Takashi Miike delivers an unusually satisfying Japanese genre romp.

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By Glenn Kenny

The ultra-prolific director Takashi Miike already had about 30 films under his belt at the end of the 1990s, when the one-two punch of the art-horror date picture “ Audition” and the ultraviolent art-horror gangster movie “Dead or Alive” wowed Western audiences. Now he’s beyond his 100th movie. Not all of his efforts make it to the States but his latest, “ First Love ,” demonstrates that his energy and inventiveness are still intact.

The movie doesn’t breathe new life into the genre conventions of Masa Nakamura’s script. But Miike choreographs and executes the proceedings with such deftness and enthusiasm that the movie feels like a standard revisited by a particularly inventive jazz pianist: the changes are familiar, but the variations set them in an exciting new environment.

Once the air of crime is established with a beheading , the next 20 minutes of “First Love” are devoted to an unhurried introduction of the key players. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is an intense, taciturn young boxer who is scolded by his trainer for declining to rejoice in victory. He makes ends meet by assisting the owner of a tiny restaurant; after taking an unexpected fall in the ring, he learns that he has an inoperable brain tumor.

Kase (Shota Sometani) is a brash drug pusher working with a crooked cop to double-cross not only his own associates but some rival Chinese dealers. Finally, poor Monica (Sakurako Konishi) is a young woman who’s been sold into prostitution by her own father, who is in hock to some of the associates that Kase intends to burn.

As she’s being hustled to a hotel where Kase has arranged for her to meet her death, Monica breaks free. A downhearted Leo trips up her pursuer and tries to find her someplace safe to go. With the full weight of two gangs of assassins about to bear down on them, making it through the night alive will be a challenge.

The ensuing mayhem offers a fair share of gore and slapstick. Miike’s seemingly offhand inventiveness is evident in almost every shot and cut. When he depicts one crucial piece of action in animated form, it may be because the shots would have been too expensive in live-action. The effect is so cool it doesn’t matter. That’s part of what makes this director special, and makes “First Love” an unusually satisfying romp.

Not rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

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Review: A boxer takes on the mob in Takashi Miike’s joyous thriller-romance ‘First Love’

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The madly prolific and often just plain mad Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike has a knack for the deeply disturbing image: the inanimate object that suddenly leaps to life, the lower extremity that’s been severed with piano wire , the soup ladle protruding from where no soup ladle should protrude .

His latest movie, the nimble and sweetly disarming “First Love,” finds him in a comparatively mellow mood. The scariest thing we see in it — a bespectacled, middle-aged man wearing only a pair of tighty whities and running straight at the camera — may not be a freakout for the Miike pantheon. Even still, it’s hard to imagine another director who could invest the image with such a singular mix of hilarity and unease, all while maneuvering a drug-smuggling, car-chasing plot across Tokyo over the course of one long and very violent evening.

The half-naked man isn’t real; he’s a hallucination visited on the tortured psyche of his daughter, Yuri (Sakurako Konishi). Sold to a yakuza clan to work off her ne’er-do-well father’s debts, she’s been locked away and forced into drug addiction and prostitution. We meet this doe-like innocent around the same time we meet the movie’s main protagonist, Leo (Masataka Kubota), an emotionally reserved young boxer with his own tragic backstory: Abandoned by his parents shortly after birth, he has grown up to be a more-than-promising pugilist. But a tumble in the ring sends him to a doctor, who informs him that he has an inoperable brain tumor.

A terminally ill boxer; a sex worker with a heart of gold; two noble, downtrodden souls with no one else to turn to: Masa Nakamura’s screenplay boasts enough archetypes-verging-on-stereotypes to populate an old 1950s heart-tugger straight out of the Warner Bros. vault. Then again, I doubt that said heart-tugger would have featured a one-armed mafioso or a grief-crazed moll who goes on a crowbar-dragging rampage after her pimp boyfriend bites the dust.

But Miike, the most egalitarian of splatter-mongers, finds room for all of them and more. Although the title of “First Love” nods to the touching Leo-Yuri romance that becomes the story’s beating heart, the movie itself is the latest demonstration of its director’s talent for nonstop madcappery and ensemble crowd control. The plot is set in motion when the conniving young Kase (Shôta Sometani), a junior yakuza who suggests that even organized crime has its upstart millennials, secretly ignites a turf war between his gang and rival Chinese triads.

Kase’s scheme involves joining forces with a crooked cop and double-crossing Yuri’s pimp, unwisely provoking the anger of the aforementioned crowbar dragger, Julie (popular singer-actress Becky), who spends the rest of the movie in a state of furious, mesmerizing bloodlust. Yuri gets caught in the crossfire, and Leo, passing her by chance on the street, raises his fists and comes to her rescue. His own recent death sentence, it would seem, has inspired him to cast all inhibitions aside.

Miike orchestrates the ensuing fallout with breathless momentum and — remarkably, given the sheer number of moving parts — a narrative clarity that persists even when the third act starts to get bogged down in car chases, climactic duels and endlessly brandished weapons. By the director’s standards, however, and also by those of a yakuza-thriller master like Takeshi Kitano, the gore is fairly restrained; a couple of heads roll, but the most brutal action is either implied or cloaked in the shadows of Nobuyasu Kita’s cinematography.

Violence has long been a steady tool in Miike’s kit, as he has demonstrated over the course of a career that spans almost 30 years and more than 100 movies. He made his name in this country with early cult hits like “Ichi the Killer” and his 1999 horror masterpiece, “Audition,” though he deserved more recognition than he received for his later forays into martial arts classicism with “13 Assassins” and “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai.”

Compared with those pictures, “First Love,” with its chaste romantic interludes, slam-bang set pieces and occasional dubious-taste sight gags, might have seemed scrappy and tossed off. Instead it’s a joyous piece of filmmaking, a demented, multitasking little scherzo from a director who cranks out four new features a year on average and who never seems more relaxed than when he’s in an absolute frenzy. To watch it is to feel Miike’s industriousness and partake of his pleasure: The cinema is his first love and likely also his last.

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‘First Love’

(Not rated)

(In Japanese and Mandarin with English subtitles)

Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

Playing: Landmark Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles

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Takashi Miike ’s “ First Love ” shows that even his type of excessiveness can have a breaking point, at least when it comes to dreams of balancing tight storytelling with massive character rosters. At some point, a plot can be so busy that its spectacle becomes superficial, a key glitch here within the manic pacing of “First Love,” scripted by Masa Nakamura . Though it has a tight course of events and is spiked with a few surprises, "First Love" is far more impressive for how it collides its many characters than what it ever feels for them.

Miike tries to hold all of his pieces together by giving them distinct tones—lead lovers Monica and Leo are characters seemingly picked from dramas about agony and despair. For the somber Leo ( Masataka Kubota ), this film becomes like Miike’s take on the hallowed cinematic metaphor of the boxer, showing someone who fights against the great sadnesses in his life, including him being abandoned as a child. But Leo's spirit is crushed when he randomly collapses during a match, the result of newly discovered brain tumor that’ll soon take him down for good.  

Leo finds his mate—and a tone to match—with Monica ( Sakurako Konishi ). She too is haunted by the sadness in her past, related to a mysterious name that she cries out, and a departed father who appears in supernatural hallucinations, only wearing glasses and tighty whities. Like Leo, she has a death sentence of her own, in the form of a drug addiction that started when she became a call girl for the drug dealers her father was indebted to. Monica is so trapped by these problems that her current apartment is even used as a drug dealing hub.  

But these two provide a hollow heart of the story, which is really a bumbling circus started by Kase ( Shota Sometani ) and a corrupt cop named Otomo ( Nao Ohmori ). Their plan involves Yakuza thug Kase hijacking a drug deal from his own people, and when he gets caught by Otomo, Kase will get out of prison in two to three years, after which the Yakuza and Triads will have (very likely) wiped each other out, and the money will be theirs. It seems like a good idea for about two or three minutes, but falls apart when Kase bungles his attempt to jump fellow gang member Yasu, and Monica (whose apartment Kase is going to rob) can’t be wrangled by Otomo, and Yasu’s girlfriend Julie (Becky) kills a Triad guy Kase had sent to stop her. In the mix, Monica is saved from Otomo by a chance encounter with Leo on the street, who uses his boxing skills to fight for someone else (something recommended to him by a fortune teller in a previous scene), and the two are on the run, with Otomo’s badge in their possession.  I haven't even gotten to the different mob bosses soon put into the field, including a one-armed man who can nonetheless still pump a shotgun. 

This is just the start of “First Love”’s nuttiness, its energy not emotionally immediate, just frantic. There’s always an encouraging ambition in any filmmaker throwing so many pieces together, and keeping them all in motion. But even the worst of similarly-designed Coen brothers movies know, for example, that it’s vital to make us care about the most clumsy of dimwits, and that they shouldn’t be merely chainsaws in a juggling act.  

Miike hurls audiences into these different scenarios and for the first half or so challenges you to keep track of everyone’s significance, because there’s a big chase later involving everybody—and the Yakuza, the Triads, and the cops. He takes the viewer from one shadowy corner to the next, but the camera’s energy is oddly restrained to that of a quiet spectator, whether it's placed behind some clutter as Kase and Otomo assemble their foolish plan, or sitting on the ground across from Leo and Monica as they start a deeper connection. Setting up all the players, these dialogue-driven scenes at least become a strong indicator of the film's calibrated performances, and Miike’s ability to harness them with crisp editing (one explanation for how he’s amassed more than 100 films in his career).  

Yet even as these various zig-zagging plot lines start to intersect, “First Love” amasses less chutzpah than you might expect. Every five minutes or so it’s a sequence of someone trying to get out of a tricky scenario, like when Kase is stuck driving a furious, vengeful Julie, with her being totally unaware Kase was the one who just killed Yasu. Happenstances throughout the story are used like narrative flourishes without greater meaning than to reckon with life’s casual absurdities—it’s funny when a gangster simply gets a leg cramp at probably the worst time in his life, but “First Love” doesn’t do anything else with it. Overt humor instead pokes through with only passing kookiness, like when new characters abruptly enter into the fray, and even sooner meet death.  

“First Love” finds its footing in the third act, which takes place in an arena befitting the movie’s chaotic energy of characters being in the wrong place at the wrong time—a massive, labyrinthine hardware store with no (conventional) way out. As Miike bounces between emotional and comical beats, it’s constantly surprising about who is around each corner, and it sometimes leads to a Wild West shootout, or samurai sword duel. Some relief arises with this finale simply because Miike's expansive character roster starts to thin out, and it might even make you wish the film went even more over-the-top, now that there’s no reason for anyone to get out alive.  

But any Miike fans looking purely for “ Ichi the Killer ”-grade insanity will be slightly disappointed in “First Love.” Sure, some heads get sliced off, and there’s an unexpected burst of comic book pizazz, but the movie can feel as sober as it is tangled. The wildness of “First Love” instead comes from its stunt-plotting, which uses a dying boxer and dumb drug thugs and even a nearly naked dancing ghost to careen toward a parting message about choosing life. It’d all be more poignant—or deeply amusing—if “First Love” didn’t feel like it ran out of steam before the punchline. 

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

First Love (2019)

108 minutes

Masataka Kubota as Leo

Sakurako Konishi as Monica

Shôta Sometani as Kase

Nao Ohmori as Otomo

Jun Murakami as Ichikawa

• Takashi Miike
• Masa Nakamura

Cinematographer

• Nobuyasu Kita

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First Love review – a bloody slice of Tokyo pulp fiction

Director Takashi Miike plays to his strengths in a flamboyantly violent boy-meets-girl crime caper

L ess than three minutes into Takashi Miike’s First Love , a severed head rolls into an alleyway, eyes wide open and blinking in shock. Eye-popping is one way to describe the prolific Japanese director’s 103rd film, a cheerfully pulpy Tokyo-set noir.

Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a boxer, hunkily brooding and ambivalent in an Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers kind of way (or maybe, with his red jacket, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause ). He has unfulfilled potential, with little to live for – until he runs headfirst into damsel in distress Yuri, aka Monica (Sakurako Konishi), an addict and sex worker on the run from the mob.

On their tail is the enraged girlfriend of Yuri’s now-dead pimp (Becky Rabone, in a gleeful and deranged riff on the gangster’s moll), as well as a comical, coked-up yakuza named Kase (Shōta Sometani). There’s also the ghost of Yuri’s abusive father, who appears at inopportune moments wrapped in a large white sheet.

Kôji Endô’s thundering jazz-rock score amplifies Miike’s tendency towards playful cartoon excess. A seemingly benign mechanical puppy triggers an explosion. In another adrenaline-fuelled scene, the action literally explodes into an anime sequence in homage to the elderly Japanese stuntmen whose blockbuster car chases Miike was inspired by. These tonal swerves temper some of the more flamboyant violence.

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Review: Takashi Miike’s “First Love” Is More Violent Than Romantic

The Japanese auteur builds on his signature theme of cartoonishly bloody action movies but eschews sympathetic characters and drama.

By Richard Yu , 27 Sep 19 00:52 GMT

When you hear that a movie is called First Love (also known as Hatsukoi ), and revolves around “a young boxer and a call girl who fall passionately in love,” you would not be remiss to think that it would be a great date night movie. In this case though, you couldn’t be more wrong⁠—Takashi Miike’s latest film First Love bears more resemblance to gory splatter films than any romantic drama.

First Love is set in the context of a yakuza turf war between an old-school Japanese gang and an up-and-coming Chinese gang. This context is believable and rooted in reality: director Takashi Miike indicated in an interview that as the Yakuza lose power in contemporary Japan, “outlaws from different cultures such as the Chinese are taking advantage [of the situation].”

The Japanese gang is holding Monica (Sakurako Konishi) as a sex slave, forcing her into prostitution to pay off her father’s debts. Yakuza underling Kase (Shota Sometani) conspires to steal drugs from his fellow gangsters, blame it on the Chinese, and hide out in prison while the ensuing battle takes out the yakuza leadership so he can come out on top. He does so with the help of crooked cop Otomo (Nao Omori), who calls on the services of Monica as part of Kase’s ruse.

Hints of Romance

Kase’s plans go awry when Monica suffers drug withdrawal effects and runs away from Otomo, into the arms of the boxer Leo (Masataka Kubota), who just learned that he has an inoperable brain tumor. Together, the two evade Japanese and Chinese gangsters; both groups think she has the stolen drugs (which are actually with Kase).

Up to this point, audiences unfamiliar with Takashi Miike’s previous work are probably wondering when the romance is going to begin. Perhaps a beheading in the opening minutes was to foreshadow the violence that would follow, but otherwise there was little indication that this film would be more crazy than charming.

There are even hints of romance between Monica and Leo—Monica tells Leo about how her dad used to abuse her, and how one of her classmates would always come to her rescue. Leo reminded her of this classmate, Monica tells him, and Leo ends up taking Monica around the city after noticing she has nowhere to go home to.

Violence Over Plot

Things turn violent pretty quickly once the gangsters catch up to our lovebirds. The action ultimately culminates in a bloody fight scene in a warehouse where the gangsters cut off each others’ limbs and shoot each other with shotguns.

However, the gratuitous violence ends up being more cartoonish than dramatic, and does little to advance the plot. The story itself is pretty simple, and unlike a Chinese movie that also told a love story over the course of a night , First Love lacks any meaningful character development. Director Takashi Miike said he found a balance in the film through the “hopeless outlaws’” death also marking “the beginning of love,” but we fail to see that balance as the film eschews the “beginning of love” for outlaw deaths for the majority of the running time.

Fans of Tarantino’s movies like Kill Bill or Inglorious Basterds may well enjoy the focus on bloody fights over character development or plot, but other moviegoers will end up unsatisfied by the relatively simple story and lack of depth to any of the main characters.

First Love (Japanese: 初恋 Hatsukoi) —Japan. Dialog in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Directed by Takashi Miike. Running time 1 hour 48 minutes. First released May 17, 2019 at the Cannes Film Festival. Starring Masataka Kubota, Nao Ōmori, Shota Sometani, and Sakurako Konishi. 

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Takashi Miike’s romance First Love starts with a bloody decapitation

The prolific Japanese director hasn’t lost his edge

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First Love is a love story, but right from the opening scenes — which feature a bloody, severed head being flung into the street, expression still twitching — it’s clear the film defies the expectations of a movie labeled “romance.” Of course, it’d be foolish to expect anything less from Takashi Miike.

Miike has a reputation for extreme, stylized violence and pushing boundaries as far as they’ll go — look no further than the controversial Ichi the Killer or the horror staple Audition . But on top of that, he’s prolific and unparalleled, having directed more than a staggering 100 films over the course of his career.

First Love is a reminder that Miike hasn’t had to choose between quality or quantity. The ingredients that make up the gangland-set romance aren’t necessarily fresh — Miike pulls from every gangster movie you’ve ever seen to put his new film together — but that hardly matters when they’re all deployed with such aplomb.

Leo (Masataka Kubota), a young boxer, lives a somewhat listless existence, having been abandoned by his family as a baby and boxing just because it’s the only thing he knows how to do. Even his manager, who tries to get him to demonstrate some iota of emotion at his wins in the ring, eventually gives up on the matter. But the discovery of a fatal brain tumor shakes his stoicism — as does his run-in with Yuri, (Sakurako Konishi), who goes by “Monica,” a young woman working as a prostitute to pay off her father’s debt to the yakuza. Both of them are stuck in dead ends, yet as they begin to bond, they’re given the slightest chance at a better future.

Also in the mix are a corrupt cop, Otomo (Nao Ōmori), working hand-in-hand with a yakuza, Kase (Shōta Sometani), to intercept a shipment of drugs to get rich and incite a gang war, respectively. However, their collective level of competence is piteously low, turning what would have been a relatively simple scheme into a series of calamities that bring more and more characters into play. Still, never once do the separate threads of First Love ’s plot become difficult to follow or distinguish, as Miike keeps things as clear-cut as the (increasingly inventive) action scenes.

The sense that First Love is a Frankensteinian mix of elements of other stories also comes through in the way each character represents a stock role as filtered through Miike’s bizarre sensibilities. Monica, the ingenue struggling with drug addiction, is haunted by hallucinations of her abusive father clad in tighty-whities. Would-be-punk Kase’s desire to be a legitimate gangster manifests in macho posturing (he literally alters his voice to try to sound more serious) that falls apart as soon as his plans begin to go awry. Juri (Becky), a gangster’s girlfriend, turns into an unstoppable killing machine when vengeance is put on the table.

The film’s cast, plot, and action might come off cartoonish if not for the way that things immediately escalate from there, ascending into territory that feels distinctly Miike, and accordingly outsized and unpredictable. The most stylized sequence in the film is a surprise, but, at the same time, almost feels inevitable. How else could Miike illustrate the climax of his gangster fantasy except … well, it’s too good to spoil.

That it all comes together instead of falling apart has everything to do with the way Miike treats tender emotions just as passionately as the violence and eccentricity that more easily characterize the film — First Love is ultimately as soft-hearted as it is bloody. Leo and Monica’s immediate bond doesn’t take a back seat to the gangster violence that surrounds them, and is depicted just as earnestly. There’s a soap opera sweetness to the young would-be lovers that Miike cranks up to tearjerker territory rather than making them objects of ridicule.

That earnestness is one of the other themes that tends to be consistent in Miike’s work. Even in a film like Zebraman , which centers on a 3rd grade teacher who begins spending his nights dressing up as a superhero from a cancelled TV show from his childhood, viewers aren’t invited to laugh at so much as share in and become just as ardent about his fantasy. First Love hinges on Miike’s skill for drawing in his audience with new angles on old characters and a constantly moving plot. He turns what could have felt like rehashed territory for the story of two doomed young lovers into delightfully transporting fare.

First Love opens in Los Angeles and New York on Sept. 27. The film expands nationally on Oct. 7.

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‘first love’ (‘hatsukoi’): film review | cannes 2019.

Prolific Japanese genre maestro Takashi Miike’s latest Cannes world premiere 'First Love' is a riotous rom-com with a high body count.

By Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton

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Rival underworld assassins decapitating each other with samurai swords. Ghostly apparitions dancing through subway trains in their underpants. Home-made incendiary bombs triggered by cute toy dogs. Welcome back to the darkly funny, ultraviolent universe of Japanese pulp auteur Takashi Miike , returning to the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar in Cannes with his latest genre-hopping gangster rom-com First Love.

Set over a single evenftul night in Tokyo, First Love is Miike’s fourth international co-production with the London-based Recorded Picture Company. It offers little thematically or stylistically novel that devotees of Japan’s most prolific B-movie maestro will not have seen many times before. Even so, the Tarantino-style rollercoaster ride is as effortlessly enjoyable as ever, accentuating the director’s lighter comic leanings over his bloodthirsty side. Having built a global cult following in a career spanning almost 30 years and over 100 directing credits, Miike’s latest superior genre exercise will likely fill many more cult-movie festival slots and do modest but reliable business on big and small screen.

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Miike and frequent screenwriting collaborator Masaru Nakamura are unabashedly dealing in familiar pulp-fiction archetypes here. Sullen pretty-boy Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a talented young boxer with a troubled family history and a possible death sentence hanging over him in the form of a brain tumor, which makes him fearless bordering on reckless. Yuri, aka Monica, (Sakurako Kanishi) is an innocent woman sold into a living hell of prostitution and drug addiction by her abusive father to pay off his debts to the yakuza. One night in Tokyo, these two doomed lovers are thrown together by fate after baby-faced gangster Kase (Shota Sometani) tries to double cross his bosses, cutting a secret side deal with crooked cops to hijack an incoming drugs shipment.

By Kase’s Machiavellian calculations, blame for the heist will fall on a rival Chinese underworld clan, and he will escape the resulting bloodbath with a handsome pay-off. But of course, the best laid plans of mice and gangsters rarely run smoothly. The long night ahead proves to be full of treacherous twists and explosive escalations, with sword-wielding fury Julie (Becky Rabone) out for revenge following the murder of her yakuza boyfriend. Set in a deserted warehouse store, the riotous finale throws the two fugitives into the middle of a huge showdown involving mobsters, police, one-armed bandits and elite Chinese assassins.

Miike shoots First Love with typically zippy, kinetic, brightly colored panache. But the grindcore bloodlust levels are unusually restrained by the director’s hyperbolic standards, lighter than usual on hallucinatory surrealism and cartoonish splatter violence. The stock characters and routine crime-thriller plot mechanics also make for a fairly conventional first half.

That said, there is still plenty of enjoyable gory comic carnage here. The high-energy brio also kicks up a gear in the second half, particularly during the bravura final battle. A brief detour into Pop Art-style animation late in the story comes as a joyous surprise, earning rowdy cheers and applause at the Cannes premiere. And as ever with the hardest working director in pulp cinema, even if Miike’s latest genre-blurring bloodbath leaves you a little underwhelmed, just wait a few weeks and another two or three will come along.

Venue: Cannes film festival (Directors’ Fortnight) Production companies: OLM, Recorded Picture Company, Toei Company Cast: Masataka Kubota, Sakurako Kanishi, Shota Sometani, Becky Rabone, Nao Ohmori, Jun Murakami Director: Takashi Miike Screenwriter: Masaru Nakamura Producers: Muneyuki Kii, Misako Saka, Jeremy Thomas Cinematographer: Nobuyasu Kita Editor: Akira Kamiya Music: Koji Endo Production designer: Takeshi Shimizu Sales company: Hanway Films, London 108 minutes  

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‘First Love’: Sensitive topic gets the mainstream treatment

Sexual abuse has long been wrapped in silence in Japanese society, with victims reluctant to speak out or press charges for fear of being shamed or disbelieved. That fear still exists, but more films here are taking on abuse as a theme, such as Kana Yamada’s 2019 “Life: Untitled,” which examines its impact on sex workers.

In contrast to “Life: Untitled,” an indie drama by an up-and-coming director, “First Love” is a commercial film headlined by Keiko Kitagawa, one of Japan’s biggest stars at the moment. It’s aimed at the mass audience, which has a preference for broad performances and storylines hewing to familiar formulas. That is, they tend to like what they are used to seeing on TV.

Given its subject matter, I had hoped “First Love” would rise above such expectations, but it doesn’t quite. Also, its scenarios of abuse are atypical and nonviolent, which doesn’t mean the trauma they cause is false, but I couldn’t help feeling that punches were being pulled to make the film more acceptable to the mainstream.

Am I being too cynical? Perhaps, but in a similar vein, many local action films keep on-screen body counts at zero, making them more programmable for network primetime.

Kitagawa plays Yuki Makabe, an earnest psychologist who becomes intrigued with the case of Kanna Hijiriyama (Kyoko Yoshine), a college student who has been arrested for the fatal stabbing of her art professor father (Itsuji Itao). As it happens, Kanna’s lawyer, Kasho Anno (Tomoya Nakamura), is the brother of Yuki’s nice-guy husband, photographer Gamon Makabe (Yosuke Kubozuka). Kasho, we find out, was also once Yuki’s lover.

Despite the awkwardness she feels in dealing with Kasho, Yuki wrangles an interview with Kanna, who comes across as unbalanced and unreliable.

She gains Yuki’s sympathy, however, when Kanna reveals that when she was a girl barely out of elementary school, she became intimate with a male convenience store clerk. “He forced me to be his girlfriend,” she says. Also, her slimeball father made her pose with nude male models (positioned in a way that the girl couldn’t see their genitals) for his male art students. How creepy and bizarre. But is it a motive for murder?

Yuki recalls her own childhood shock on learning that her father hired prostitutes on his overseas business trips. Abandoning her perch of authority, she shares this incident with Kanna — and the two women bond, as emotional dams burst.

Yuki hopes that Kanna can win an acquittal by revealing her history of abuse, but given her confession to the cops and the Japanese justice system’s 99% conviction rate, this possibility seems remote indeed.

After all the crying, shouting and other perfervid emoting, Kanna’s trial seems oddly affectless, unfolding with all the drama of a company auditor summarizing quarterly results to assembled shareholders. (Given the scripted nature of so many Japanese criminal trials, it is also the most realistic part of the film.)

Even so, “First Love” deserves credit for bringing the problem of sexual abuse into the multiplexes, however far-fetched and overplayed its story may be. But if raw and real is what you want, see “Life: Untitled.”

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First Love review – a sometimes lovely, longwinded romance

This review of First Love is spoiler-free.

First Love is what the kids these days might describe as “a vibe”. The nine-part Netflix series is based on two songs by Hikaru Utada – “First Love” and “Hatsukoi”, and it doesn’t really get more vibe-y than that, does it?

This longwinded romantic drama out of Japan is a familiar thing, perhaps to its detriment. All the usual beats are present and accounted for, some unnecessarily drawn-out or hampered by a needlessly convoluted structure, but there’s also some comfort to the predictability. First Love delivers those feelings of giddy young love, of painful separation, long absences, and sudden reconciliations in spades. It’s at least a couple of episodes too long, but it’s impressive in its construction, visuals, performances, and emotional power.

The love story of Yae Noguchi ( Hikari Mitsushima ) and Harumichi Namiki ( Takeru Satoh ) takes place over multiple time periods, swapping between actors and – that word again – vibes as it goes. It can be confusing in its execution, and sometimes too wavering in its focus. Yae has dreams of being a flight attendant but is forced to contend with the repercussions of an accident that affects her short-term memory; Harumichi becomes a pilot in the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, which comes with a lot of moral and social responsibility. Both drift together and then apart and then together again through various circumstances, some outside of their control and some driven by their own decision-making, though most, admittedly, a little too fanciful and made-for-TV to be bought into entirely.

But the actors really sell all the ups and downs, which helps the audience to get invested, and there’s a lot of surface-level beauty to take in if you’re of a mind for it. Its themes of love, responsibility, and fate are well-developed across the episodes, meaning that when it counts, First Love can satisfy emotionally.

It takes a while to get there, though. I know I’m always complaining about the length of shows, but in an age of so much content , these things matter; they influence how people choose to consume things. First Love doesn’t have enough story to fill nine hours, and that becomes obvious quickly. Once that idea has settled in the plot beats do begin to feel a little reiterative, the flashbacks a little plodding, the interactions a little strained, and so on, and so forth, as though the show is simply idling to pad the runtime.

Not to be too downbeat, obviously. A healthy contingent of viewers are going to really love and relate to this, and good for them. The cast’s efforts are worthy of that attention, and word of mouth will benefit First Love . But I think it has a somewhat niche appeal, mostly suited to big fans of the genre or the talent involved – those looking for a nippy binge-watch or anything legitimately fresh will be mildly impressed but probably not quite satisfied.

Additional reading:

• First Love  ending explained .
• Will there be a  First Love  season 2?

Article by Jonathon Wilson

Jonathon is one of the co-founders of Ready Steady Cut and has been an instrumental part of the team since its inception in 2017. Jonathon has remained involved in all aspects of the site’s operation, mainly dedicated to its content output, remaining one of its primary Entertainment writers while also functioning as our dedicated Commissioning Editor, publishing over 6,500 articles.

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Story: Leo Katsuragi (Masataka Kubota) is a promising young boxer, but one day, somebody unexpectedly knocks him out. He goes to the doctor and an MRI shows that he has a tumor in his head. He is not expected to live much longer. He wanders through the streets apathetically when suddenly the girl Monika (Sakurako Konishi) runs past him and a man follows her. She screams for help and therefore the boxer knocks the man out cold with a straight punch. To his surprise, the unconscious man is a police officer called Otomo (Nao Omori). Otomo is corrupt and he forged out a plan with the yakuza Kase (Shota Sometani) to steal drugs and to put the blame on Monika. Monika, on the other hand, pays off her father's debt by working as a prostitute and she was made compliant with drugs. This is why she didn't actually run away from Otomo, who was in fact her client that day, but from a hallucination. The boxer Leo now finds himself in a tricky situation, but stays at Monika's side to protect her. Kase and detective Otomo don't seem to be able to put their well-wrought plan into action anymore. When Kase then has to kill Juri's (Becky) friend, where Monika was accommodated at, in order to eventually take possession of the drugs, he manages to put the blame on the triads. They, on the other hand, have already tried for quite some time to challenge the yakuza for their territory. What must be, must be: a bloody confrontation between the two parties seems to be the only solution.

Review: The crime movie "First Love" starts out rather slow because it wants to introduce its various characters. At this point, it is not clear yet into what direction the film wants to go. However, the topics are familiar and only a few scenes - for instance, when a head rolls across the streets - give the impression that you shouldn't take things too seriously. If you know director Takashi Miike ( "Blade of the Immortal" ), you might already be aware of the fact that actually everything is possible in his movies. And that's exactly what we get here: After the first half of the movie, the pacing picks up by a lot, the characters, which were presented to us before, start to meet in all kinds of different ways and we descend into a controlled chaos, which mixes well-known elements in a refreshing and new way. It has to be mentioned that the black humor also provides a nice balance to the rather violent moments, so that "First Love" seems somewhat comic-like as well. A well-done mixture.

Then there are the two actual protagonists. Masataka Kubota ( "Tokyo Ghoul" ) plays a boxer, who seems rather bland at first and who doesn't really care about anything after he got to know that he doesn't have long to live. Leo's decision to help Monika actually arises from a fortuneteller's words. For the most part, this is what starts the actual machinery of the plot. Monika, portrayed by newcomer Sakurako Konishi, is also a rather flat character. But through their interaction the two characters get more elaborate and colorful, so that in the end, they actually manage to carry the movie quite nicely. Monika is traumatized by her childhood or rather by her father. The latter always chases her in his underwear, but when Leo gives her sort of traditional music to listen to, her father starts to dance along in front of her in a subway. She is still scared, but she also has to laugh. This strange, but acting-wise also very convincing, scene is characteristic for the unusual mixture of genres and emotions which Takashi Miike puts on screen.

The action is accompanied by a rock-heavy Jazz soundtrack. Which is an obvious analogism. I, for one, have no use for Jazz because everything sounds rather chaotic and nothing seems to fit together. Connoisseurs, however, can indeed detect a particular structure in this alleged chaos. Same goes for "First Love". Well-known themes from yakuza crime movies and dramas are mixed together, but the experienced director also lends a distinctive character to the movie and creates an unusual overall picture. The finished product is therefore a whole lot of fun, at the latest starting from the second half of the movie onwards. The epilogue, on the other hand, may have turned out a little too long, but you can understand the intention behind it. After all, the movie is also a drama, which wants to show us the two protagonists' journey through life. Thankfully, Miike refrained from clichés and despite the movie's title, there is just an insinuated love story, which is not shown to us during the movie but actually takes place after the end credits. This serves as another proof of the broad experience this exceptional director has.

Netflix’s ‘First Love’ Is Sign of Growing Global Success for Japan Series Content

By Mark Schilling

Mark Schilling

Japan Correspondent

• Cross-Border Animation Collaborations in Asia Trend Up as Demand for Content Expands — Filmart 1 month ago
• Why Ishii Gakuryu’s ‘The Box Man’ Took 32 Years to Reach Berlinale Premiere 2 months ago
• ‘Snow Leopard,’ Pema Tseden’s Final Film, Wins Tokyo Film Festival Grand Prix 6 months ago

In its second week on release the new Netflix series from Japan , “ First Love ,” has ascended to the number five spot on the streamer’s rankings for non-English content, as well as being its number one show in Japan for the week.     Based on two songs by Japanese megastar Utada Hikaru and directed by Kanchiku Yuri, the nine-episode romantic drama series released on Netflix on Nov. 24 and grabbed the number eight slot on the streamer’s Global Non-English list in its debut week. This week, with watch hours totaling 12.3 million, the series rose to number five.     Starring Mitsushima Hikari as a taxi driver in Sapporo who reconnects with a heartthrob (Satoh Takumi) from her teenage years after a gap of two decades, the show is also in the Netflix top ten lists of Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand, all territories where Utada’s music is popular.             Another Japanese show, the anime series “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean,” rose to the number eight slot on Netflix’s Global Non-English chart following the release of new episodes on Dec. 1.     Japanese content, with exceptions like the hit 2020 sci-fi series “Alice in Borderland,” has been in the shadow of Netflix shows from nearby South Korea, including the global smash “Squid Game.”     One reason: Japanese content producers have long focused on their much larger home market, while regarding global sales as an after-thought. Netflix, however, has been trying to change that mindset, and the success of “First Love” is a sign their efforts are bearing fruit, especially in Asia, where Japanese music, fashion, anime and other creative content has made significant inroads.     The streamer plans to build on this momentum with upcoming releases, including season two of “Alice in Borderland,” which drops on Dec. 22, and the new series by acclaimed auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu, “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House,” which premieres on Jan. 12.  

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