In a recent interview, Steven Soderbergh complained that critics are "too easily fooled." "Their reading of filmmaking is too superficial," he added. While I am as much a fan of deep insight as the next guy, I am also perfectly happy to be fooled. That is, if a director manages to salvage his pig of a film with the lipstick of creative editing, I don't need, or particularly want, to know how he did it. The evidence on the screen is all that counts.
But sometimes, as in the case of Masahide Ichii's romantic drama "Hakoiri Musuko no Koi (Blindly in Love)," I am all too aware of a film's back story. Not to go into the unpleasant details, but the film's original scriptwriter objected to certain changes made by Ichii with the approval of the producers and, failing to get satisfaction, asked that his name be removed from the credits.
This sort of thing often happens in the movie business, if not so often in Japan — and doesn't necessarily mean the film will be a botch. So I saw this story of a nerdy City Hall bureaucrat's first encounter with love with what I hoped was an open mind — and found that both the scriptwriter and Ichii had a point. The film does have a third-act problem, but the solution is forced and silly. It's as if the first producer of "Romeo and Juliet" asked its author to rewrite the play to end with a happy wedding instead of an elegy to tragic love. Who would blame William Shakespeare for walking off in a huff — or signing himself "Francis Bacon"?