Koizora (2007)
きみは幸せでしたか?
Kimi wa shiawase deshita ka?
Have you ever been happy?
It really amazes me how my life can change in less than two months. If somebody told me in the beginning of autumn that by the New Year the only movies on my to-watch list would be the Japanese ones, I'd be really REALLY surprised. But yet, that's the way things are! And I'm not at all upset about it. Not in the slightest.
My first Japanese movie of 2010 was Koizora (Sky Of Love).
The first time I heard about it was from katrine_nicole back in November during a very calm day at work. I was intrigued as for what one of the best j-movies about love could be :) And I also doubt that it's ever possible to get this kind of hair out of your head (even though I didn't approve of it at first) XD
It took me almost two months to finally accept the hair get to watching though!
Teenage love is reckless and uncontrollable. Teenage love is fragile and tender like the first bloom in the spring. Teenage love was in so many stories that it seems that there is no way a new word can be said. And yet…
Yet in Koizora you see these two little human beings who don't even know what life is, you see them collide like two stars on the horizon, see them sharing their first memories of one another from different places, not knowing who the other one is. Slowly getting closer. And closer.
The lonely airplane track in the sky doesn't seem that lonely if two people keep it as a treasure. The empty library doesn't seem empty when a new life begins there.
These two kids do not know how to live and yet the little family faces a chain of misfortunes: intrigues, rape, miscarriage, illness and death. They are unwilling to hurt one another and yet break each other's heart by those little unanswered questions that change their life altogether. If only they could change it for the better...
Every riverbend of Hiro and Mika’s love is painful and it would seem that the happiest moments they have are the ones where they know it's a one-way road.
Three moments that impressed me most were:
This kind of love. Again.
A very Pocahontas moment: “If I followed him that night, would we be together?”. I wish you chose the other path Mika. I wish you had the courage to listen to your heart and forget the pain you suffered. I wish that at that very moment you had the courage to be true to yourself.
And yet Mika chooses the path leading to the man who stood by her side when all else went wrong. Leaving all the questions high up in the air. She chooses the wide steady path to the man she is yet to hurt in the future. Why not do it earlier then?
“Every word in his diary was about me.”
This one did it to me. Seeing this diary drawing at the very end sets pictures running through your mind. And the crying face of the 17-year-old saying “I don’t want to die!” comes up again.
And you understand that it doesn’t matter how many times this kind of story was told. It doesn’t matter if it’s sentimental. Nothing matters but the fact that you believe that the story actually happened. And that sometimes it’s only the teenagers, reckless and tender, who really know what love is.