‘One Last Bloom’: Pugilist melodrama feels all too familiar

Directors who make the jump from indie films to commercial movies are common in Hollywood but less so in Japan. Still, Takahisa Zeze is among the most successful of such jumpers out there.

The director got his start in pinku eiga (pink films), churning out softcore adult fare in the 1990s to considerable critical acclaim. But the Zeze who made those films, with their experimental stylistics and touches of offbeat humor, is hard to find in his latest, the perfervid boxing melodrama, “One Last Bloom.”

Based on a novel by Kotaro Sawaki, the film is aimed squarely at a domestic audience that likes broad narrative strokes with heroes and villains as easy to read as ad copy found on train platforms.

This is also the approach of local TV dramas, as the presence of Tomoko Yamaguchi playing the manager of a boxing gym, amply illustrates. Once known as a top star in TV dramas due to her ratings hits in the 1990s, she is returning to the big screen after a 27-year gap. But in “One Last Bloom,” she comes across as blazingly clear as ever.

Main cast members similarly emote to the rafters, making Yamaguchi look relatively restrained. Meanwhile, the story not only traces the zero-to-hero arc of a standard sports movie but also tosses in dysfunctional family drama as well as medical crises that seem to occur with the frequency of the sex scenes in Zeze’s pink oeuvre.

To Zeze’s credit, the training and boxing scenes deliver more insider detail than usual for this kind of film, as if he hung out with real trainers and boxers for months and internalized the strategies and techniques of the sport.

At the story’s center is Jinichi Hirooka (Koichi Sato), a former boxer trying to restart his life in Japan after an unfairly thwarted ring career and 40 years in the United States. He soon finds an admirer in Shogo Kuroki (Ryusei Yokohama), a fiery but struggling young boxer whom he knocks down in an altercation outside a pub. Shogo realizes this white-haired old man has a lot to teach him, and he begs Jinichi to take him on as a trainee.

This is a scenario all too familiar from domestic films and TV dramas, as is the outcome: After many refusals from Jinichi and increasingly desperate pleas from Shogo, the former agrees to train the latter. Their ultimate goal is to take the World Boxing Association’s super featherweight championship, currently held by the arrogant Toshio Nakanishi (Masataka Kubota), who sneers at Shogo’s aspirations. First, though, the young pugilist has to get past the Oriental and Pacific Boxing Federation champ, the formidable Shun Otsuka (Ryota Bando).

Meanwhile, Jinichi’s reunion with Otsuka’s tough but principled manager (Yamaguchi), who is an old acquaintance and similarly single, strikes no romantic sparks — neither does Shogo’s burgeoning friendship with Jinichi’s tenderhearted niece (Kanna Hashimoto), who tells him she likes his “radiance” in the ring.

Instead, the main driver of the plot is Shogo’s do-or-die ambition and Jinichi’s do-or-die desire to help him fulfill his goals. One parallel is the classic boxing manga “Tomorrow’s Joe,” whose hero perishes in the ring with a smile on his face after he and his final opponent have pounded each other to bloody pulps.

Is the film over the top? Certainly. But as “One Last Bloom” proves with manga-esque fervor, it’s a formula that lives on, five decades after Joe breathed his last.