ayden

It’s… good. I understand the reason why the whole brother, plus funeral, plus succession plot exists but I feel that, because of that, very little time is spent (and we already have very few episodes) developing their affection towards each other—if it somehow ends up working it’s because the actors know how to deliver attraction at the level of physicality and not because the narrative demonstrates, in an effective manner, a turning point in which death drive becomes “love”. Takahashi Hiroto as Odajima, in particular, compensates for this narrative gap very well: do I want to kill him or do I want him for myself? It’s a delicious duality (complemented by Wada Masanari’s amoral horniness as Kataoka) which he’s capable of conveying with his gaze alone, but that gap still ends up leaving the latter term (“love”) necessitating, in terms of narrative, of the dead friend backstory in order to hold both of them together relationally; and yet… it’s not so much love in the sense of boys’ love romanticism… What ends up grounding their relationship, for me, is less the fact that they have a person and a past in common and more that Odajima’s self-destructiveness, fueled by a boyhood composed by blood and homicide, ends up finding a type of solace and mitigation through Kataoka’s own detachment from life itself. “You can kill me—I won’t stop you from doing what you came here to do: but aim at the right place, go on, if that is your will and your purpose then shoot… but at the right place—shoot the one that actually deserves it.” It’s a brief conclusion and it deserved to be backed by more scenes exploring their affective entanglement in the present time of the narrative, but the very fact that it chooses to resolve with a “not today—today you’re here still” ends up being effectively enlivening in spite of that.