‘Wandering’: Questionable subject matter, handled with care

Japanese films about forbidden love go back decades, but the definition of “forbidden” has changed, if more so abroad than here. Hideo Jojo’s 2022 sex comedy “Love Nonetheless” would be a hard sell in Hollywood since its story of a 16-year-old girl pursuing a 30-year-old guy as a marriage partner would raise eyebrows at the pair’s inappropriate age difference.

The same is true of Sang-il Lee’s “Wandering.” Based on Yu Nagira’s novel about a 9-year-old girl who lives contently with a 19-year-old male stranger for two months until the police arrest him as her kidnapper and presumed abuser, this film may seem on its face a feature-length apologia for pedophilia. But as seen in his previous films, “Villain” (2010) and “Rage” (2016), Lee tends to focus on unconventional relationships on the social margins against a backdrop of crime. With “Wandering,” he once again makes compelling drama from dark and even dubious materials.

Fumi Saeki (Tori Matsuzaka) has a Lolita complex, but his interest in Sarasa Kanai (Tamaki Shiratori), a girl he happens to meet, is platonic and the film presents her choice to stay with him as voluntary. Sarasa, who was sexually abused by a male cousin in her aunt’s home after her father’s death and mother’s abandonment, enjoys a new sense of freedom and safety with the tolerant, understanding Fumi, who lets her gorge on ice cream and loll about watching TV. With his arrest, her idyll comes to a jarring end.

Fifteen years later and Sarasa (Suzu Hirose) is working part-time at a restaurant and living with Ryo (Ryusei Yokohama), her marriage-minded salaryman boyfriend. A controlling type, Ryo nonetheless offers a stability that seems attractive to Sarasa’s chatty workmate Kanako (the single-named Shuri), though, Sarasa has her doubts, especially after she meets his conservative family in the countryside.

Sarasa then encounters Fumi at an upscale coffee shop, where he is the proprietor, but he doesn’t recognize her. Rather than reintroduce herself, she becomes a regular customer — and nighttime stalker. When she discovers that Fumi has an adult girlfriend (Mikako Tabe), she begins to feel jealous.

But when Ryo, who knows about her past, learns that she is still obsessed with her alleged kidnapper, he explodes in violent anger. Bloodied and reeling, she finds refuge in Fumi. Recapturing the glow of their happier days, however, will be harder.

Shot with steely precision and elegiac beauty by South Korean cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who worked on Bong Joon-ho’s Academy Award-winning “Parasite,” the film exists in a visually sumptuous, highly charged world of its own. The story, which alternates between Sarasa’s traumatic girlhood and her troubled present, unfolds on the borders between manga-esque fantasy (Nagira once wrote “boys’ love” comics and their influence shows) and the harsh realities of Japanese society, in which hate on the internet can be overwhelming and everlasting.

All this is familiar territory by now, but Lee, who also scripted the film, elevates it beyond moral melodrama with an intensity and specificity that persuades and engages, despite a tendency toward overwrought theatrics. He is aided by strong performances from Matsuzaka, who makes the damaged and inscrutable Fumi humanly sympathetic, and Hirose, who totally inhabits Sarasa in all her complexity, gut-wrenching guilt included.

The film’s discovery, however, is Shiratori, who plays the young Sarasa with a winning confidence, energy and charm. Bringing a needed light and emotional grounding to the story, she sets “Wandering” on the right, if never straight, path to success.