‘The World of You’: Director returns to the complexities of youth

Early in his career Akihiko Shiota became known for films about young people that ventured into extremes, from the social margins to sexual aberrations. This culminated with “Harmful Insect,” a 2001 film starring Aoi Miyazaki as a seventh grader with an absent father and suicidal mother, who becomes an outcast when rumors circulate that she has had a romantic relationship with a male teacher. The film won a shelf of prizes and launched Miyazaki to stardom.

Two decades later, Shiota once again depicts a girl growing up too fast, too soon in “The World of You.” Based on his original script, the film is similar to “Harmful Insect” in laying on the catastrophes with a heavy hand while refraining from tear-jerking bathos.

This time, however, the film’s narrative engine is an intense and unbalanced friendship that is all-consuming to one of the principals, if puzzling or objectionable to those around her. The protagonist’s worshipful infatuation may seem over the top, but she is nonetheless a real, familiar type, played with sharp-eyed focus by Yuzumi Shintani, a former member of the idol-pop group Sakura Gakuin. Whether the film will propel her to fame is hard to say, but she delivers a performance that burns with commitment, scorching those who doubt or oppose her character’s devotion to her love and her goal.

Yuki Aono (Shintani), who had to miss a year of school due to an unspecified life-threatening illness, returns as a high school sophomore — and obsessed with Maki Makino (Marin Hidaka, also a former member of Sakura Gakuin), her enigmatic and elusive classmate. Meanwhile, the arrogant Yusuke (Airu Kubozuka) tries to force his attentions on Yuki, but when she rejects him, he takes offense and reminds her that his divorced dad (Iura Arata) and her divorced mom (Noriko Aoyama) are seeing each other and may get married. He then adds that her beloved Maki has a bad reputation.

Soon after, Maki confesses that she sleeps around with guys and that her father is a convicted sex offender who raped young girls, and later, cements her bad-girl status when she is taken in by the police for bicycle theft. Yuki, however, remains undeterred in her affections. After hearing Maki play her guitar with cool expertise and sing with fearless honesty, Yuki’s mission now becomes making her talent known to the world, beginning with the members of the school rock band club, to which Yusuke belongs. “You can join, but not her,” he says to Yuki. But nothing, least of all Yusuke, is going to stop her.

At this point I was half expecting “The World of You” to become a musical about overcoming all obstacles, with Maki and Yuki, accompanying her friend on a bass guitar, triumphing on stage before an appreciative audience — see Nobuhiro Yamashita’s 2005 film “Linda, Linda, Linda” for a well-loved example.

The film instead flirts with medical melodrama before delivering a nuanced message about the fragility of human health, friendship and memory, as well as the way children pay for the sins of their elders through no fault of their own. Despite its darkness, “The World of You” is not a despairing film. For one thing, Yuki’s faith in and love for Maki has the force of a tidal wave that nothing, save maybe death, can stop.