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This was one of the most immersive movies I’ve found myself watching… it is full of pain, rage, violence, and escape through music as a bandage and place to feel free…
The sheer contrast between vivid, peaceful, utterly gorgeous and pristine rice fields and the teenagers growing up around them is painfully sharp. The intense guilt a weak bullied kid can feel contrasted with the fuck-it-all rage of a kid whose world went from stable with the kid a very easygoing sort to a financially ruined house with us only getting to see how the kid copes, completely transforming after a sudden rebellious trip that was the last bit of fun before a downward spiral…
Nothing I am saying here is a spoiler. This is not a linear timeline at all, and it is less a plot than being thrown straight into a middle school hell and reliving what you’ve likely either experienced or been afflicted with the pain of witnessing but having no way to change the horror someone is enduring… even with helplessness, though, we see how different the results are for kids enduring nightmares with just one person checking on them versus ones with no real sense of safety net to shoulder to lean on or even, as we see at one point, someone to physically inflict a tiny portion of one’s pain on and not be abandoned. There are powerful moments throughout if you tune in with a sense of compassion and curiosity. Those same moments, though, can easily be ignored by viewers, casting a mirror on how callous and apathetic a person might very well be seeing emotionally wrecked peers, neighbors, family members, or even total strangers. It demands your attention. It screams at you to not ignore their plights… yet does so without preaching one bit, only showing you the different kinds of humans all around and letting you see in some of them parts of yourself, some possibly uncomfortable, if you let it test your compassion and don’t throw on, even in the physically safe space of a room with a film on a screen, a shield of apathy as a defense against those preying on the defenseless.
I can absolutely recommend it to some and absolutely can NOT to quite the majority. It depends on what art you find value in. While this is not at all a BL and only has faint flickers of a couple of straight crushes that are by no means the story, just pieces of young teens’ psychological makeup, the two recent stories that I might be able to say “if you found value in… then consider this…” about are Smells Like Green Spirit (which has some overlap in story elements and likewise sharply contrasts the feelings of being stuck in your home you find hellish and finding a place you can breathe and just be a kid) and Happy of the End (because you need the same sort of ability to get immersed in the wretchedness of others’ lives and find worth in the media presented to you to really appreciate this).
It is hard hitting, and it is LONG (just 20 minutes short of 3 hours)… but it is phenomenal. If you ARE young and enduring bullying, mental health struggles, social isolation, or are witnessing it happening to others, this won’t be suitable. It is something I would absolutely put restrictions on in a cinema—R level for the content.
It also needs a dozen trigger warnings, among them sexual assault, bullying, and possible epilepsy triggers from fairly frequent fast and intense flashing of black and white graphics that are critical to read but might also induce a migraine in some. In any case, this is a rare film I took a break from mid-viewing. It starts in a disjointed manner that you just have to trust will go somewhere… but once you are locked into their world, it can feel exhausting. It might also be something many start, can’t get into, and go back to later. It is very much a mood piece.
I had to think a long while about my rating, but I found no flaws in this as I did indeed “lock in” which Debussy and my past experience with his works as a lover of his music certainly helped. Brilliant use of music, especially as the music heard the vast majority of the movie is not even the music the youth are getting immersed in. It got a truly hard-earned 10 from me. Every technical detail, every cast member’s performance, and the story told through stunning cinematography and painfully realistic performances wowed me even through an incredibly simple overarching narrative.
This may be a slight spoiler in terms of how this closes out this chapter of their lives though I won’t give details on the plot: The main near-end event of it which is both a negative and positive for characters in it (a cruel truth I’ll leave at that) and the simple thought of how different things could and would have been had someone not been fighting to survive and fighting others in that process… it is so incredibly poignant it kept hitting me harder and harder as I reflected on what I had watched.
The sheer contrast between vivid, peaceful, utterly gorgeous and pristine rice fields and the teenagers growing up around them is painfully sharp. The intense guilt a weak bullied kid can feel contrasted with the fuck-it-all rage of a kid whose world went from stable with the kid a very easygoing sort to a financially ruined house with us only getting to see how the kid copes, completely transforming after a sudden rebellious trip that was the last bit of fun before a downward spiral…
Nothing I am saying here is a spoiler. This is not a linear timeline at all, and it is less a plot than being thrown straight into a middle school hell and reliving what you’ve likely either experienced or been afflicted with the pain of witnessing but having no way to change the horror someone is enduring… even with helplessness, though, we see how different the results are for kids enduring nightmares with just one person checking on them versus ones with no real sense of safety net to shoulder to lean on or even, as we see at one point, someone to physically inflict a tiny portion of one’s pain on and not be abandoned. There are powerful moments throughout if you tune in with a sense of compassion and curiosity. Those same moments, though, can easily be ignored by viewers, casting a mirror on how callous and apathetic a person might very well be seeing emotionally wrecked peers, neighbors, family members, or even total strangers. It demands your attention. It screams at you to not ignore their plights… yet does so without preaching one bit, only showing you the different kinds of humans all around and letting you see in some of them parts of yourself, some possibly uncomfortable, if you let it test your compassion and don’t throw on, even in the physically safe space of a room with a film on a screen, a shield of apathy as a defense against those preying on the defenseless.
I can absolutely recommend it to some and absolutely can NOT to quite the majority. It depends on what art you find value in. While this is not at all a BL and only has faint flickers of a couple of straight crushes that are by no means the story, just pieces of young teens’ psychological makeup, the two recent stories that I might be able to say “if you found value in… then consider this…” about are Smells Like Green Spirit (which has some overlap in story elements and likewise sharply contrasts the feelings of being stuck in your home you find hellish and finding a place you can breathe and just be a kid) and Happy of the End (because you need the same sort of ability to get immersed in the wretchedness of others’ lives and find worth in the media presented to you to really appreciate this).
It is hard hitting, and it is LONG (just 20 minutes short of 3 hours)… but it is phenomenal. If you ARE young and enduring bullying, mental health struggles, social isolation, or are witnessing it happening to others, this won’t be suitable. It is something I would absolutely put restrictions on in a cinema—R level for the content.
It also needs a dozen trigger warnings, among them sexual assault, bullying, and possible epilepsy triggers from fairly frequent fast and intense flashing of black and white graphics that are critical to read but might also induce a migraine in some. In any case, this is a rare film I took a break from mid-viewing. It starts in a disjointed manner that you just have to trust will go somewhere… but once you are locked into their world, it can feel exhausting. It might also be something many start, can’t get into, and go back to later. It is very much a mood piece.
I had to think a long while about my rating, but I found no flaws in this as I did indeed “lock in” which Debussy and my past experience with his works as a lover of his music certainly helped. Brilliant use of music, especially as the music heard the vast majority of the movie is not even the music the youth are getting immersed in. It got a truly hard-earned 10 from me. Every technical detail, every cast member’s performance, and the story told through stunning cinematography and painfully realistic performances wowed me even through an incredibly simple overarching narrative.
This may be a slight spoiler in terms of how this closes out this chapter of their lives though I won’t give details on the plot: The main near-end event of it which is both a negative and positive for characters in it (a cruel truth I’ll leave at that) and the simple thought of how different things could and would have been had someone not been fighting to survive and fighting others in that process… it is so incredibly poignant it kept hitting me harder and harder as I reflected on what I had watched.
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