‘To the Supreme!’: Clever rom-com keeps twists coming

Japanese women are a forgiving and forbearing lot if Santa Yamagishi’s rom-com “To the Supreme!” is any indication. Based on a 2015 stage play by Shuko Nemoto, the film features four protagonists whose male partners range from hapless to hopeless, with few, if any, redeeming qualities.

And yet the women stick with them, at least for the film’s first act where the action putters along with no obvious point beyond light comic back-and-forth between the four couples. Their stories unfold in separate silos, though there are moments of parallelism and signs of past connections.

Then, just as the cute comedy of unmarried domesticity starts becoming tiresome, the bickering escalates to heated arguments. Doors slam and belongings are tossed.

What happens next may be a mild spoiler, but it shows why this smartly plotted film is a cut above: Extended flashbacks reveal that our eight protagonists once had different partners, but all within their octagonal group. And in seeing how these four couples broke up and reassembled, we get clearer insights into their individual flaws and strengths, with the men having far more of the former.

At the start of the film, nerdy costume designer Machiko (Atsuko Maeda) reconnects with Reito (Fuma Kikuchi), a former middle-school classmate who is now a smooth-talking livestreamer sponging off his followers. Meanwhile, struggling TV personality Suzu (the single-named Shuri) is cohabiting with Tommy (Yudai Chiba), a chirpy gay man who dishes about an obnoxious, wealthy lover but is oblivious to her never-to-be requited feelings for him.

We also meet Miwa (Marika Ito), a blonde part-timer living with Taizo (Reiji Okamoto), a layabout with a loud mouth, though he is silent on the subject of rent. Finally, there is Nanase (Mei Kurokawa), a cheery sex worker whose steady client is Shintaro (Takahiro Miura), a former child star now reduced to bit roles and seething with injured pride.

It soon becomes obvious that all the men are bad news for the four women, though they can be affectionate and even thoughtful at times. Taizo, for example, somehow scrapes up the money to gift Miwa with gold-plated grills that give her a big laugh.

The drama comes to a head when the women finally rain down their righteous anger on their partners for their various sins, from Reito’s freeloading off an ex-girlfriend to Taizo’s selfish celebration when Miwa’s possible pregnancy turns out to be a tumor. Yes, I thought, kick the bums out.

But Nemoto, who also wrote the film’s script, is not satisfied with a simplistic feminist statement, so the twists keep coming as the story moves back and forth between the early days of the pandemic in March 2020 and August 2018.

Yamagishi, who has directed many music videos along with a smattering of TV dramas and films, keeps the pace brisk and performances spritely without seeming too stagy. But “To the Supreme!” ends up as more of a conventional feel-good film than I would have liked. Yes, love is wonderful, but so is getting what you deserve rather than settling for what you need.