100 Yen Love

Ichiko is thirty two, does not leave the house, plays games and lives with her family. After a fight with her sister she moves out. She rents a small flat and takes the night shift at a shop where everything costs a hundred yen. Across the road there is a boxing gym. A relationship starts with Yuji, who trains there, and it is short. Ichiko signs up at the gym. For somebody past thirty an amateur licence is almost impossible, and she will get one fight. Masaharu Take directs. Sakura Ando plays Ichiko and Hirofumi Arai plays Yuji. It is a Japanese production. The film won the best picture award of the Japanese cinema section at the Tokyo Film Festival and was submitted by Japan for the foreign language Oscar. Sakura Ando was named best actress at the Japan Academy Film Prize for the part. Ando changed her body for the role and plays the fight scenes herself. The matter it treats is accepting that you will lose; the film sets up the shape of a sports story and withholds the victory. The first half is heavy and uncomfortable; Ichiko is not a likeable character. The film shows the people at the gym as losers too. The narrative shows harassment and violence directly. The ending does not depend on the result of the fight. Its limit is tone; the narrative is gloomy, some scenes are hard, and the hope comes late. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese independent cinema and films built on performance. Who it is not for: it is gloomy, harsh, and the ending rueful.