To talk about the differences between men and women now is to step into a minefield. One rhetorical foot wrong and off goes the tripwire.
But Shunsuke Arita's new comedy "Handling Method for Grumpy Woman" strides blithely into this minefield, awkward English title and all. A first-time director with TV experience, Arita has guides to this treacherous territory in Ihoko Kurokawa, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher who wrote the nonfiction book on which the film is based, and Natsuko Yokosawa, a comedian who assisted with Naomi Hiruta's script and who appears in the film. ("When I first read the book I thought it was a manual on how to deal with me," Yokosawa says in a program comment.)
However, this doesn't mean the film is free from cringe-inducing cliches and stereotypes. Set in a wedding hall and focusing on a trouble-plagued reception, the story features such familiar characters as the teary, locked-in-the-toilet-stall bride (Rena Matsui), the well-meaning, clueless groom (Daichi Saeki) and the hectoring, meddlesome groom's mom (Mayumi Asaka).