Sunday, March 1, 2015
Alternate title: Funuke, Cowards, Show Your Sad Love, Funukedomo, Kanashimi No Ai Wo Misero, Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!
When the homely 18-year-old Kyomi (Aimi Satsukawa) loses both of her parents to a car wreck, tragedy sets the stage for a seriocomic and occasionally poignant battle-of-wills between the young woman and two of her siblings. So begins Japanese director Daihachi Yoshida's slice-of-life seriocomedy Funukedomo, Kanashimi No Ai Wo Misero (AKA Funuke, Show Some Love You Losers!, 2007). Upon learning of her parents' death, Kyomi's older sister, the financially-strapped and emotionally-troubled actress Sumika (Eriko Sato), hearkens back to the family's bucolic home to collect on a healthy inheritance - but the girls' brother, the woodcutter Shinji (Masatoshi Nagase), informs her of standing legal delays. Thus, Sumika moves into the house (occupying her childhood room) and waits out an indeterminate period of time, unable to foot the cost of a return to Tokyo. Yoshida then flashes back to detail the family's colorful and occasionally violent past - involving Sumika's prostitution, death threats directed at her father, and exploitation of her conflict with her father by dramatizing and publishing the events in a bestselling manga. Back in the present-day, Sumika receives an offer to write a screenplay and once again turns to family strife as dramatic fodder for her fictions - rapidly coming to the conclusion that perhaps her eccentric family isn't so terrible after all. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi