Love is questioned when Asako starts dating her disappeared boyfriend’s doppelganger…
I’m just not sure what to do anymore, because nothing I can write would make an effective opening to a review of Asako I & II, nothing would lead into it adequately, and any conclusions I will draw will be unsatisfactory, so what else is there to be said?
It’s about love, except when it’s not; it’s about obsession and idealism, but it’s about the power of settling; it’s about how everything can go wrong so quickly, so horribly, and how we should be thankful that so much of what we know is real, because the fantasy could run out at any second.
Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has a knack for the spellbinding. Though he has made some smaller features and short films as well, he was catapulted into the public conscious when he produced the 320-minute behemoth of a domestic drama that is 2015’s Happy Hour. After that, he was always bound to turn heads, and this is his first offering since.
That said though, Asako I & II has slipped under the radar somewhat. It competed at Cannes, but couldn’t get a look in what with Lee Chang-dong’s Burning and Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters taking most of the spotlight and Hamaguchi’s romance only receiving lukewarm reviews from critics when it premiered.
It’s so easy to forget some things that get lost in the cracks, let’s not make this one of them.
It feels so much like it will just be a competent, pleasant romance film with some slightly fantastical elements. At points, it feels like it comes from a Haruki Murakami novel (the source material is actually a book by Tomoka Shibasaki), and at many points, I was ready to settle down. The film was not.
The film tells the odd tale of how Asako (Erika Karata) begins dating Ryohei (Masahiro Higashide) in Tokyo after her ex-boyfriend, Baku, goes missing. The catch is that Baku and Ryohei look exactly the same, but where Baku was an unexplainable free spirit, Ryohei is exceedingly dependable, if slightly boring, but all wrapped in the same handsome skin.
In many ways, this is a young person’s romance, centred on ideal partners, and the deepening platonic relationships of a small circle that comes with being young and social and friendly.
And yet, even though Asako I & II plays itself as a very straight story, the nature of having these identical characters creates a sense of unease, both among the characters and the audience, as we’re plunged into a Saramago-esque world of discomfort.
As a character, many have written that Asako is a husk compared to the more fleshed out characters around her, and while we will certainly get to the other characters, it makes the most sense to examine this with Asako as a central figure.
For my money, Asako isn’t a husk in the narrative sense, but she is played very deftly on debut by Karata as a character who questions herself at every turn, and who views herself as a husk, meaning that that is what she presents to the audience. Where other characters have personalities that could be summed up in one sentence, Asako feels a disconnect, and that is where a lot of the tension stems from.
Hamaguchi does internal drama so well, but where Happy Hour was a slow burner, the drama in Asako I & II is explosive, if small scale. The film lulls you into a false sense of security before slapping you awake on more than one occasion. The script is written in such a manner that you can’t help but wonder about all the ‘what ifs’ and whether they could have made any of the characters happier.
This constant sense of change is also expressed in the film’s setting. The majority of the film takes place in Tokyo, shot with love and a strange sense of nostalgia. However, the film opens with beautiful establishing shots of Osaka, where Ryohei and Asako plan to move later on, and there are a few scenes near Sendai, where relief work occurs after the 2011 earthquake. The setting is used well by Hamaguchi not only as a sensible plot device, but as a palette cleanser to stop the film going in circles, ensuring that there is always some movement.
And then, there is the operative question when it comes to a romance film, how is the companionship between the central couple? I suppose if we were making the standard romance, the story of Kushihashi and Maya may be more heartwarming; they start out arguing viciously about how to perform Pinter in her apartment but eventually become the perfect vision of a nuclear family, but Asako I & II is something else, and it focuses on an apparently boring couple’s relationship that seemed to occur completely by accident.
And yet, one can’t help but feel that that could be the very point of it. Higashide and Karata are both very good and mix moments of excellent chemistry with those of unease to great effect, balancing the central thread on a knife edge.
In terms of how the romance is as a romance though, that’s something that you will need to watch the film for, as that’s where all of the dramatic weight lies, resulting in a denouement that made me focus wide-eyed on the screen in a way that I haven’t done in a very long time. What I will say is that, in terms of being so utterly about love, and about the ways that that can affect every single choice that we make, Asako I & II might be the most romantic film I’ve ever seen. Some credit must go to the source material, but all credit to Hamaguchi for coaxing something that made the pit of my stomach feel very strange indeed out of what had the potential to be a very middle of the road romance.
Asako I & II may have been comparatively ignored at Cannes when one looks at the praise heaped upon the other Japanese and Korean films there, but much like the film itself, it should quietly burn, and then leap forward when the time is right. It created a mood that felt utterly unique, and most surprisingly of all, provoked in me a response of anger towards a film that I still feel very positively about.
This is surely a sign that these characters who at first seemed so one-dimensional are ones that you will truly come to care about and wish the best for. It may blindside you, it may not, but it’s far from a cuddly romance that you might wish to watch for Valentine’s Day, and it could potentially be described as rather bleak.
Hamaguchi is quietly carving out a niche for himself in Japanese domestic drama, focusing on the network of relationships among a close group of friends, rather than the more outwardly focused works of Koreeda. Asako I & II is an easier sell than the exceptionally lengthy Happy Hour, and it absolutely deserves to be seen, wherever you can find it. It may not be everything you hope it to be, and it certainly won’t be what you expect, but hey, that’s love for you.