Jun (Fuju Kamio) is a good-looking high school student with an awful secret: He’s gay, and having an affair with a married man. Kooky classmate Sae (Anna Yamada) has a secret of her own: She’s addicted to BL (boys’ love) manga, a homoerotic genre aimed at female readers.
These two things absolutely aren’t the same, but they’re treated that way in Shogo Kusano’s “What She Likes...,” a well-intentioned but spectacularly tone-deaf drama that shows how far mainstream Japanese cinema is still lagging in its depiction of LGBTQ issues.
Part of the problem, of course, is that so many films are based on BL manga, an escapist genre that’s hardly the best place to look for realistic portrayals of gay relationships. When Jun catches Sae buying a typically racy title in a bookshop, he pinches it from her and has a few chuckles at how implausible the storylines are.