a delightful Japanese-style romantic comedy

With “Tempura”, the Japanese director Akiko Ohku humorously revisits the genre of romantic comedy in an inventive production, which features a single thirty-something in search of herself, love, and balance, in a changing society. The film, audience award at the Tokyo International Film Festival, will be released in French theaters on July 20.

Mitsuko, 30, lives alone in her small apartment in Tokyo. She tries to live her celibacy with relaxation in a society that still does not accept that a young woman is not married after 30 years. Mitsuko spends a lot of time talking with her best friend, “A”, who happens to be inside herself.

This “double” is both a support and a mentor who comments on his life and suggests “single girl challenges”like going to the beach or eating yakinikus (grilled meats) alone in a restaurant or, the ultimate challenge, traveling solo.

Mitsuko likes to cook and when her colleague Ada met by chance in the street while she is shopping asks her to share with him the dishes she prepares, the young woman accepts with pleasure. From then on, every day with the regularity of a clock, Ada comes to get her packed lunch from Mitsuko.

The beginning of a love story? Will the young woman dare to invite Ada for good to dinner? Will she be able to emancipate herself from her reassuring double like a cocoon to live her life, and love? Will she be able to let go of solo life and live together?

Behind the daily life of her heroine, the director captures the inflections of a changing world. In a very codified Japanese society, Mitsuko, a whimsical and somewhat offbeat young woman (magnificently embodied by the actress Non) has trouble taking the plunge to get out of her bubble.

She wishes to live a romantic relationship with Tada, without giving up on herself and her solitary happiness. It will take time, simple moments shared with Ada (especially the crucial meals), a getaway to a spa, a trip to Rome and another, more dreamlike, on a beach in Okinawa, to find the strength to expel this double which prevents her from coming out of herself to meet the other.

“Mitsuko thus explores not only the difficulty for a social being to flourish in solitude – which is all the more difficult to assume for women, supposed to be fulfilled through heterosexual conjugality – but also the difficulty of leaving a another subject enter his personal space”

Akiko Ohku

director of “Tempura”

Adapted from a novel by Risa Wataya, this second feature film by Akiko Ohku offers a very personal version of the romantic comedy. With blurs, out-of-frame shots, off-screen shots, slow motion, dreamlike images and very good sound work, the director plays an immersive staging, as close as possible to her character, which propels the viewer into the bubble, in the inner world and the flow of feelings and thoughts of her heroine. The effect is reinforced by the presence of “A”, this little inner voice, which the director had the audacity to choose as masculine.

Around Mitsouko, the secondary characters – his colleague steeped in love for a caricature of a macho male, or his friend living in Rome, married, pregnant, but who feels so alone – act as counterpoints illuminating this reflection on the couple.

Apart from a few small lengths, this romantic comedy, both light and deep, full of poetry and humor, offers an exciting focus on today’s Japan and its youth, in full search for meaning, with a joyful offbeat look. .

Gender : comedy, drama, romance
Director: by Akiko Ohku
Actresses and actors: No, Kento Hayashi, Ai Hashimoto, Asami Usuda, Airi Katagiri, Takuya Wakabayashi
Country : Japan
Duration : 2h13
Exit : July 20, 2022
Distributer : Art House Movies

Synopsis : Mitsuko has always lived in her bubble. In the heart of a Tokyo too big for her, she devotes herself with passion to cooking recipes that she refines from her small apartment. As a fulfilled single person, she sets herself new challenges every day, including the unprecedented one… to invite a boy to dinner!