Orange

On the morning Naho starts her second year of high school she finds a letter in the postbox. The person who wrote it is herself, ten years on. The letter sets out what will happen that day and the days after, one by one, with warnings: do not do this, say that, do not leave him alone. A new student called Kakeru joins the class that day. What the letter says is this: Kakeru will die before long, and the reason is something his friends do not notice. Naho shows it to her friends and all of them hold the same letter. The five of them try to change the past. Kojiro Hashimoto directs. Tao Tsuchiya plays Naho and Kento Yamazaki plays Kakeru. The source is Ichigo Takano's comic. The matter it treats is regret; what the letter writers are after is not saving the future but making up for what they did not do. The time scheme is explained, but the film's interest is not science fiction; the mechanism is only a means. The narrative takes suicide as its direct subject and does not tie the cause to a single event. Its best sections are the scenes among the group of friends; the effort to intervene is shown as clumsy and true. Its limit is length; the narrative is long and repeats in its middle stretch. Another limit is register; the emotional peaks are frequent and the music too directing. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese drama about the young and comic adaptations. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, the pace slow, and the melodrama strong.