Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Boys Love - A Review

Director and writer Terauchi Kotaru (we learn from the supplemental material) thinks that gay love is somehow more pure than straight love “because gays are not productive (don’t make babies), like straight people.” With this insight into the human condition, he gets a bunch of straight boys to make a movie about gays, writes a script around a “famous” and “handsome” (you’ve got to take his word for it) high school artist and model, Noeru, bullied as a child and then “abandoned” by his best friend, Ken. (Not really – Ken dies in a hospital.) Angry that the friend “broke his promise” to always be there, Noeru has become promiscuous and obnoxious. One day he is interviewed by celebrity magazine editor Mamiya, whom he proceeds to seduce in the men’s room. Mamiya feels Noeru’s pain, falls in love, and determines to put him right. (Warning. Spoiler follows.) Unfortunately, this makes Noeru’s other childhood friend, Chidori, jealous, so he stabs Noeru, as pure lovers apparently are wont to do. Then, evidently following the same line of pure love logic, Mamiya takes Noeru’s bloody corpse on a train to the sea and dumps him in the ocean. End of story.

As if this plot line were not taxing enough, the director interjects a series of non-connected quotations about love and jealousy by famous writers seemingly chosen at random, adding even more silliness to the story. Everything about this movie makes you wonder how it ever got off the ground. Overacting. Elementary school artwork. Gratuitous violent rape scene (with clothes on). And the entire plot depends on people never locking their apartment doors to avoid getting caught in flagrante delicto.

Guess we’re supposed to say thank you straights are making boy-meets-boy movies. Now if we can just get them to make gay boy-doesn’t stab-gay boy movies, we’ll be getting somewhere.

The music is nice. So’s the male flesh. But man, what a stinker. Even the English title is ungrammatical.

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