Sexual orientation is often defined in black-and-white terms: You're either straight or gay — or kidding yourself. Author Gore Vidal has famously objected to this binary classification, claiming that there's no such thing as homosexuality, only homosexual acts.
In Momoko Ando's debut feature "Kakera" (A Piece of Our Life), the mixed-up heroine, Haru (Hikari Mitsushima), shows that Vidal is right — or does she? More than same-sex bedtime joys, she is searching for connection in the form of a soft warm touch and an understanding heart. She's not so much seduced as gathered into friendly arms, like a lost puppy run away from a bad home.
Ando's approach is unlike that of "Love Juice" (2000), Kaze Shindo's strongly erotic, emotionally explosive portrait of a rocky lesbian relationship. Instead it reminded me of Sofia Coppola's candy-colored and apolitical, but cheeky and original, take on the French Revolution in "Marie Antoinette" (2006). (Apropos of nothing, Ando is the daughter of actor/director Eiji Okuda; Shindo, the granddaughter of director/scriptwriter Kaneto Shindo, and Coppola, the daughter of director Francis Ford Coppola.)