Movie review: Kakera -A Piece of Our Life-

I'm reviewing the R2 DVD release of Kakera. The only noteworthy extras are a 21 minute Q & A session with the director, Ando Momoko, after a screening of her film in the UK, and a 28 minute interview with Ando, just in case you can't get enough of the director who made a shitty adaptation of a good manga. "I usually, actually have a notebook called, like, a dream diary. And because...since I was an art student all the scenes actually come with a picture first, actually as a story, but then I try to patch them together and try to make sense in the story, even though I had to, uh, it had to be based on somebody else's story. So that's how I actually processed the writing." (Emphasis mine.)

Right. So Kakera follows the very, very basic bare bones of Sakurazawa Erica's upbeat romantic drama Love Vibes, which is really worth reading and doesn't deserve to be linked to this god-awful movie.

Kakera is about the "romance" between Haru and Riko, who replace Mako and Mika, respectively, from Love Vibes. Haru, a college student, has a loser boyfriend, but with her perpetually blank expression and the dreary haze she constantly seems to be be wandering in, she isn't much of a catch either. Riko, her love interest, is everything that her manga counterpart, Mika (my favorite in the manga), is not: dull, depressed, and of dubious psychological stability.

A perfect example of how the movie spat on the manga's story and characterization: At one point in Love Vibes, Mako gets invited to a Christmas Eve mixer, and accepts because she's scared of telling her friends that she has a girlfriend, Mika. Mika understands and trusts Mako to not cheat and come back to have Christmas cake together. After outing herself to a guy who's interested in her, Mako excuses herself from the mixer and goes home to see Mika, thinking of how much she loves her and wants to spend Christmas with her. In the movie, Haru goes with some friends to a bar and Riko, who calls her and flips out after learning that there are guys there, shows up at the bar looking like she stepped out of Misery. She pulls Haru away from her friends, and they spend the rest of the evening sitting away from them with Riko grasping Haru's hand, snapping at anyone who approaches.

Not only are all of the characters horribly rewritten (don't get me started on how Shouko was changed), this movie includes pretentious BS symbolism, like Riko's prosthetics job representing the hole in her heart or whatever, and a bottle of tea turning into a two-headed dove.

This movie was such a drag throughout that I didn't care that its ending was completely different from the manga's happy ending. I don't want to watch another minute of Haru and Riko's lives, whether they're together or apart.

Story: A critic's quote on the back of the DVD cover gushes, "A manga adaptation done right- very right." Did he actually read the manga?
Cinematography: Drab, like its characters.
Overall: F