Rohan au Louvre

"At the Louvre I saw the Black"

Kishibe Rohan takes his supernatural ability to read people like a book on the road to Paris. At the Louvre he will confront a relentless evil residing in a hidden painting. The story jumps back and forth in time with much of the story told in the past. Fair warning: If you have arachnophobia you will want to avoid this film at all costs.

Rohan is working on a new manga and after remembering a story about the blackest of blacks, so black it doesn’t reflect light and is in essence invisible, decides to hunt a painting down that uses the rare pigment. Death and spiders follow the path that takes him to an auction for a painting and then to the Louvre in search of the original.

The cinematography ranged from gauzy and ethereal, to elegant, to dark and foreboding. Discordant notes and chords accompanied the creepier facets of the film. The supernatural elements of Rohan’s gift and the cursed painting were well done, especially for someone who has neither read the manga nor watched the drama.

Takahashi Issei can always be counted on to give a layered performance even when wearing a headband designed for a manga character. He actually played two characters, giving them both separate personalities ranging from light to absolute darkness. Marie Iitoyo as Rohan’s editor seemed out of place with her childlike acting. Kimura Fumino matched the mood of the film as the haunted Nanase. The Louvre could almost be counted as a cast member with its lovely exhibits, own complex history, and gloomy, forgotten vaults.

The film felt like it might have been better served as a two-episode drama due to all of the backstories which took up a substantial amount of time. Both of the trips to the past felt overly long. Not having the compelling Issei on the screen also took away from the forward momentum of the story. Overall, it was a strange, creepy (crawly!) movie that did manage to integrate the past and the present connections to the sinister painting lurking in the shadowy corners of the Louvre.

10/25/23

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a 4 year tradition!

I do hope they make more :(
I’ll start with the good, the acting, Rohan as a character, the art and hunting aspect are great

The bad, the pacing wasn’t smooth, the teen vr wasn’t interesting and the connection didn’t happen until the last ten minutes or so
Which was also the moment the plot actually moved, so for a two hour movie, that’s a bad balance, eventho there was a search, it wasn’t that complicated, it was all so simple but it took so long to reach
Fl eventho she has her charm, she’s also a bit like a NPC/ helping hand, she’s always not treated as a person, more like a blank sheet
The connection between Rohan and nazuki(?), eventho appreciated, that story felt disconnected beside the black haired lady


Why was he the old painter? I really loved the acting, even the ironic “if he didn’t go back to his family, his sick wife and him would’ve not died”, which is a poetic remoteness
But why was he acted by takahashi? And sure the black hair lady wanted the painting and her husband’s curse broken but

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Rohan stuff is always interesting

So Rohan decides to come to France to the Louvre museum because the Japanese needs some excuse to go to Paris because they’re obsessed with French stuff, let’s just be honest. So Rohan has some kind of history with this black painting, and the lady that he knew at his grandmother‘s rental house who has really black hair. In the past, they had a weird exchange where he was trying to draw his manga and ended up drawing this black haired lady, but the lady saw his drawing and stabbed it with a pair of scissors, so that didn’t go very well. Many years later, Rohan, who I imagine was scarred by that experience ends up paying for this black painting that is supposed to be so incredibly black and so-called evil which was referenced by this black haired woman in the past. There are a lot of details that I don’t really understand which have to do with paintings and duplicates and originals and some artists that was smuggling originals behind duplicates and hiding them in some storage underneath the museum. The scene that really came alive was when this black painting was revealed in some storage basement area of the museum. This reveal of the painting that Rohan has been looking for in some form creates a kind of hallucination of people’s past sins and so they start seeing those past sins come alive. But the lesson should only be about remorse so I don’t understand why it needs to be so scary. Then there’s some strange flashback about this black haired lady and the man you married, who happens to be another version of Rohan – it’s like a double act of Takahashi in his half shaven ponytailed glory. So black haired lady gets really sick and somehow stumbles upon this really black tree sap from the sacred tree and starts harvesting it so that her double act Rohan like ponytail husband can paint a better picture than his dad who is supposed to somehow save his wife since she got sick. Well as he starts painting the trees, SAP seems to engulf the entire scene and it’s power. I don’t think the tree itself is evil, but rather it is the use of it and its powers and its sap for human purposes that felt corrupted. So back in the present moment, where everybody is being turned crazy by this black haired painting at the museum, Rohan decides to do a Heaven’s door on himself and write down forget everything which is a great thing for any main character to do in any show. I’m surprised he didn’t forget everything, including how to talk or walk. But somehow everything resolves into a nice little package at the end and everybody goes home happy.

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