Last year veteran director Akiko Ohku had a breakthrough hit with "Tremble All You Want," a romantic com edy about a 24-year-old office clerk still obsessed with her girlhood crush but yet to have an actual boyfriend. Played with discombobulated verve by Mayu Matsuoka, this loser-at-love won audience hearts, while making Matsuoka the local industry's "it girl."
Now Ohku is back with "Marriage Hunting Beauty," a rom-com based on Arako Toaru's manga of the same Japanese title. Once again the heroine is looking for love in the wrong places — namely married guys slow to reveal the wife waiting at home. And once again she is a klutz at romance, if not to the same nerdy extent as Matsuoka's clerk. She even has a good buddy in the married Keiko (Asami Usuda), essentially the same character as the understanding office colleague played by Anna Ishibashi in "Tremble All You Want."
What the film doesn't have, however, is a similarly quirky, relatable protagonist. The heroine, Takako (Mei Kurokawa), has what might called a problem of privilege: a conflicted relationship with her own gorgeousness.