Of Japanese movies about star-crossed young lovers there will never be an end. The mostly female audience never tires of them, decade after decade. The genre has hardly gone extinct in the West either, though fans now tend to like their romantic fantasies spiced with everything from moody vampire heartthrobs ("Twilight") to splashy musical production numbers ("Glee"). Here they still like them straight, made with the age-old ingredients of fated partings and tragic deaths.
With all the opportunities for practice, local filmmakers have polished genre conventions to a fine sheen, nearly always working from a hit manga, novel or TV drama. The resulting products are as sure a bet as anything in show business.
But a media consortium led by Asmik Ace has gone a bold step farther in making "Bokura ga Ita (We Were There)," a romantic drama based on a megahit manga by Yuki Obata, into a two-part epic clocking in at nearly four hours total. Directed by Takahiro Miki, a music video maestro whose first feature was the 2010 romantic drama "Solanin," the first part will be released on March 17, the second on April 21.