Be With You (2004)

It took me 5 sessions to watch "Be With You". It's not longer than two hours but that's how hectic my schedule was this week. To be fair, the first attempt didn't last longer than 10 minutes before starting to fall asleep, so I had to re-watch almost all of it. And the ending in the last turn intrigued me a bit, enough to move back to re-watch some other few minutes. So, after all, the movie isn't probably as boring as might seem initially... However, beware the drama...

What we have here is a Japanese adaptation of a novel (if I didn't manage to move away from the Asian cinema neither for this week, I decided to at least move a bit out of the continental part), which starts with something close to "Love Story"'s ending = she dies young, and from there it somehow moves back but forward. In brief, we have a bit of sci-fi/fantasy in the movie, part in which she keeps a promise to return for a while, during the rainy season in Japan's weather. Time that allows us to figure out the couple's background. And... that's pretty much it... + about 15-20 minutes of an epilogue, which surprisingly cuts a bit short the feeling of "I know how this goes on...".

I was convinced to watch this movie by its categorization as fantasy on IMDb (didn't see the trailer), and I can say that I feel a bit cheated from that perspective. It's 100% romance, so that's what you should expect and nothing else, but fortunately it's one that's relatively fine. It probably depends on the mood too. There are some parts that can be truly heartbreaking, but unlike other movies it has a sort of calmness tempering it, and moreover helping to avoid getting into a cheap tear jerking area. I suppose that some of the credit for this goes to the written material. Which apparently was re-booted last year in a Korean remake. I'm fine with the original for now.

Rating: 3 out of 5 (slightly subjective)