We Made a Beautiful Bouquet

Mugi and Kinu miss the last train and meet the same night. They read the same books, listen to the same bands, love the same films. During university they move in together. Then they graduate and working life begins. Mugi joins a company and stops reading. Nobuhiro Doi directs from a screenplay by Yuji Sakamoto. Masaki Suda plays Mugi and Kasumi Arimura plays Kinu. Its distinguishing move is refusing to attribute the ending to an event. Nobody cheats, nobody behaves badly; the relationship ends because one of them changes. Sakamoto builds this through shared taste: book titles, games and concert tickets run through the film as the measure of how much two people overlap, and the measure comes apart over time. The level of detail is high. Real writers, real bands and real games are named, and the film maps the cultural coordinates of a particular generation living in Tokyo at that moment. It was a large success in Japan and resonated especially with viewers in their twenties. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese romantic drama and films about relationships ending quietly. Who it is not for: the film tells you where it is going from the start and the last half hour is long, and the cultural references are dense enough that some of them are lost from outside.