The Real Thing: Japan’s Cannes Contender Follows the Needy Woman of Man’s Dreams

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Bad romances make for good movie plots, a rule that’s proved again in The Real Thing, a Japanese drama about of a 30-year-old Tokyo office worker whose comfortable life is upended by an encounter with desperate femme fatale.

Adapted by Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada (Hospitalité, Harmonium) from a popular manga, The Real Thing originally ran as a 10-part series on Japan’s Nagoya TV, and has been cut down to a just under four hours for theatrical distribution. The cinema version was part of this year’s Cannes competition, and several other film festivals, including in Tokyo, as part of a retrospective on the work of director Fukada, before this week’s VOD release.

Though it comes with good credentials, four hours feels like a lot of screen real estate for a what is essentially an elevated soap opera. For the home-streaming viewer though, The Real Thing meets the essential requirements for binge-watching: it’s undemanding to follow but sustains enough of a mystery to keep us hooked.

Boyishly handsome Tsuji (Win Morisaki from Ready Player One) is a hyper-conscientious office worker in a Japanese Onda Toy and Fireworks company. The one peculiarity in his conformist personality is that he is intimately involved with two women at his job. One is a strictly after-hours secret arrangement with his dour supervisor, Naoko Hosokawa (Kei Ishibashi), though they’re not even on a first-name basis. The other is a public, casual relationship with the office’s immature flibbertigibbet, Minako (Akari Fukunaga).

Then Tsuji meets “the real thing” by saving her life by pushing her stalled car off a railway track before the train hits. When the police appear, the strange woman Ukiyo (Kaho Tsuchimura) tells the police that Tsuji was the driver. A moment later, she changes her story, apologizes for lying, and then disappears. When the car rental company calls his office complaining she returned a damaged car, Tsuji has a justification for tracking her down.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

One clue to film noir ancestry of The Real Thing is that Tsuji has a pet crayfish at home called Marlowe, presumably after Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective hero, Philip Marlowe. But Ukiyo is no flinty temptress like Lauren Bacall or Barbara Stanwyk in a 1940s potboiler. Dressed in a rust-coloured shift, with her head down and forever apologizing, Ukiyo is the kind of mess Tsuji wants to fix. “I can’t stand sloppy people,” he tells her harshly.

In Ukiyo he finds his dream girl, a woman of bottomless needs: She’s in debt to a yakuza boss, who plans to sell her into prostitution to recover his costs. Also, she has a possessive ex-husband, and a daughter, and a history that includes a double suicide attempt with the son of a rich tycoon.

Also, Ukiyo has a bad habit of showing up drunk in taxi cabs, stalking him at work, and making public scenes, and everyone warns Tsuji this can’t end well. Strictly speaking, he does get encouragement from one source, the sardonic yakuza boss Wakita (Yukiya Kitamura), who supports the relationship, he explains, because he enjoys watching stupid people destroy themselves.

In the television series, Tsuji and Ukiyo are variations on stock types, the repetitive crises and parade of fresh characters are shaped by the needs of episodic programming. What’s innovative is the ambiguity of the rescuer-victim dynamic.

As genuinely abused as she has been, Ukiyo draws others into her turmoil and self-pity while Tsuji’s is too ready to see his hunger for emotional intensity as heroism. In one grimly funny scene, Tsuji and old lover Daisuke (Shugo Oshinari) argue about who is weaker and more pathetic, and therefore deserving of Ukiyo’s devotion.

In the film’s final act, which takes place three years after the main action, there’s a reversal of roles, with Ukiyo taking on the role of the rescuer. Long before that, the emotional battlefield feels laid to waste and the combatants and viewer tuckered out. Though we can’t reasonably hope for a fairy tale “and they lived happily ever,” it’s a small life-sized victory just to say they lived.

The Real Thing. Directed and written by Koji Fukada. Based on the manga by Mochiru Hoshisato. Starring Win Morisaki, Kaho Tsuchimura, Kei Ishibashi, Shugo Oshinari, Akari Fukunaga, Shohei Uno, Yukiya Kitamura. Available now on Amazon.ca and iTunes.