My Rainy Days (2009)

I picked out this movie randomly by looking at the poster. While I expected an immature girl falling in love with her professor, it turned out to be different from what I thought. It was a sweet and touching story. Also, it has its light moments and the rest of it was kind of serious. It was a fairly engrossing film. I cared about the characters and was fairly interested in the plot till the end.

A relationship between a 17 year old girl and a 35 year old guy seems creepy, and if not portrayed correctly it can go terribly wrong. However, this has to be one of the best student-teacher relationships that I have seen. They were very likable together and none of it seemed forced or stupid. Both the older guy and the younger girl had solid reasons to fall for someone so unexpected. I really liked their love. And I was touched by the girl. In the beginning, she is a bad girl. As in real bad- she works as a prostitute and bullies others. When it seemed like she hardly had any redeeming qualities, she changes completely. It's basically about character development which was the focus point of the story. The girl turns into a very nice and serious person. She stops fooling around, studies hard and changes her ways entirely.

The best thing about their relationship was that she changes a depressed, anti-social person to a happy and expressive person. And while she seems so mature in front of her friends, she acts exactly her age with her teacher. She is attracted to his serious side and he falls for her youthfulness. It was very sweet to watch them together.

Another good thing was that we get informed of the incoming "serious" problems beforehand in the first scene itself. I hate when things drop in on the viewer unexpectedly, out of nowhere! I would have liked to focus a bit more on how she became a bad girl because I found that rather interesting.

The movie has a fairly good star cast and I particularly liked the main actress. She was pretty and was able to act well. I also loved the clothes she wore throughout the film. She even made carrying umbrellas look trendy! She had a pretty magnetic personality. I was also happy with the direction of the film. It was not a well written screenplay and there were a lot of inconsistencies with the plot and pace. But that part gets compensated with good cinematography. Even the soundtrack is cool. I loved the songs they played in the background, plus they were in English so I will probably download the soundtrack later.

Anyway, the movie is overall a very nice effort from the director and writers. While it is not THE best, but it is still great and manages to get its point across to the viewer. It made good sense.

I will definitely rewatch it again when I feel like it.

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I didn't know whether to watch this film or not, I'd never seen the lead actress in anything before and wasn't crazy about the age gap between the leads (I'm shamefully notorious for picking dramas and movies with ikemen male leads). However I'm glad I gave it a shot because this is one of the most enjoyable Japanese films I've ever seen.

Sasaki Nozomi was outstanding as Rio, I was seriously impressed with her ability to master every emotion out there from tragic lover to cold ice queen to bubbly school girl. I often find angsty characters a bit of a bore however hard their lives are but I loved Rio! Her friends were equally likable and I almost wished we could have seen a bit more of them but overall I'm glad the story didn't try and steer off into millions of sub-plots that never get developed like a lot of movies do.

The thing I loved most about this film however was Tanihara Shosuke as Kouki. He was such an ordinary guy, nothing special about him, but the way we saw him through Rio's eyes made him appear to be the most special man on the planet. I was initially put off by the age gap but a few minutes into this film and it was completely forgotten. Straight after watching the film test yourself, would you pick Kouki over a thousand Matsujuns? I felt I could and would (if such a miracle ever occurred).

The story was touching, sad and the leads relationship felt very real, overall a romantic, interesting and heartbreaking film.

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