Japanese Film Festival 2024: We Made a Beautiful Bouquet (Nobuhiro Doi, 2021)

 

Note: some spoilers.

There's a part in Nobuhiro Doi's We Made a Beautiful Bouquet where Kinu (Kasumi Arimura) finds out that one of her favorite bloggers has died. Said blogger often (perhaps cynically) talked about the end of love, that every love story's beginning is the beginning of the end, that all love stories have an expiry date. This love story is no exception: in fact, the very beginning of the film has its two protagonists dating other people, the entire film being a flashback of the five years leading up to that point. This is not a story of love that endured forever; this is love that has run its course and has arrived at its natural conclusion.

You wouldn't know it from the start, though: this film features one of the most romantic meet cutes in contemporary Japanese cinema. Kinu and her soon-to-be boyfriend Mugi (Masaki Suda) feel like they were born to be with each other, with their two actors bringing their A-game to the proceedings. I half-joke, but the only time where I saw Masaki Suda have more chemistry with his co-star was either with Renn Kiriyama or Nana Komatsu.

But things take a turn for the worse, and perhaps either by design or coincidence, the film gives us a clue to what dooms the relationship. Over time, Kinu and Mugi's relationship changes, and during one disastrous movie date, Kinu has that realization. The movie they are watching is Aki Kaurismaki's The Other Side of Hope (2017). We Made a Beautiful Bouquet feels like a response to Kaurismaki's romantic films that portray working class people striving to make ends meet in a bleak world. It joins films like Never Not Love You (2018) that show the detrimental effects of the ever increasing demands of labor on a young population. "Just endure it for five years and it'll be easy," a sempai tells Mugi as they drive around the prefecture, but what he doesn't tell Mugi is that it's not easy because the work will be simpler, things will be easy because he will have been numbed to the culture. While Kaurismaki optimistically believes in the endurance of love despite living in a capitalist world in films like Fallen Leaves (2023), in this film, at least in part, capitalism is the end of love. It kills something fundamental within us, where trying to make a living prevents us from just living, where marriage becomes a compromise rather than a commitment.

But the film does not end on a bleak note.  Breakups can be planned in advance and treated with positivity, but they are hardly a clean break. Even though the love is gone, the act of having loved will never go away. Still, as long as it wasn't abusive, there's nothing wrong with treating past relationships with gratitude, because (hopefully) you and your partner changed each other for the better, and you will carry that to your next relationship, and to the next. The author Ranata Suzuki once said that "your heart is a mosaic of everyone you've ever loved," and this film takes it to heart.