Love letter
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Love letter |
| Country of production | Japan |
| original language | Japanese |
| Publishing year | 1995 |
| length | 116 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Shunji Iwai |
| script | Shunji Iwai |
| production |
Tomoki Ikeda Jiro Komaki Masahiko Nagasawa |
| music |
The Pillows Remedios |
| camera | Noboru Shinoda |
| cut | Shunji Iwai |
| occupation | |
| |
Love Letter (English love letter ) is a Japanese love story by director Shunji Iwai from the year 1995 . It is about a chance pen pal in which memories are exchanged about a deceased person. It was Iwai's first cinema production. The then pop musician Miho Nakayama plays both main roles in a double role. Even Miki Sakai made her debut in this film.
Love Letter is one of the first Japanese films to be shown in Korean cinemas after World War II. The film was very successful in Asia. The film also won various awards.
action
Hiroko Watanabe is a young woman who lives in Kobe . Two years ago, her fiancé Itsuki Fujii died in a climbing accident, which she has still not dealt with very well. As part of the commemoration of the two-year anniversary of his death, she looks at an annual Fujii from his school years. There she discovers an address assigned to Itsuki Fujii. Hiroko decides to send a letter to this address, which she believes no longer exists because a motorway was being built there. However, she does not send the letter to her fiancé's address at the time, but to his former classmate who has the same name.
So the letter reaches Itsuki Fujii, a young woman who lives in Otaru with her grandfather and mother . She has had a mild cold for a long time, but refuses to see a doctor. Although she is very surprised at the letter, she answers it. Hiroko is happy about the letter and thinks it came from her fiancé, who wrote from heaven. She tells Akiba, a long-time friend of Hiroko and his fiancé. He tries to help her come to terms with death, also because he has feelings for Hiroko, what he tells her. So Akiba investigates and finds out the mix-up.
Akiba and Hiroko drive together to Otaru to visit the author of the letters. You can find the house where Itsuki lives. But since she is not at home at the moment, Akiba and Hiroko give up waiting after a while and drive off again. Before that, Hiroko wrote a letter in which she cleared up the confusion, but did not mention that her fiancé died two years ago. Back in Kobe, she verifies in the yearbook that there was actually another Itsuki Fujii in his school class alongside her fiancé. So Hiroko asks her pen pal Itsuki to share her memories from school.
Some flashbacks, commented on by Itsuki, now tell memories of the two Itsukis from their school days together. The male Itsuki was a strange, withdrawn, unfriendly boy. Both suffered from bullying during school days because of the equality of their names. From the flashbacks it becomes clear that at that time classmates suspected both Itsuki had feelings for each other, which both denied and the female Itsuki also denied when writing the letters.
At that time, both Itsukis also worked together as a library. The male Itsuki liked to borrow books that no one else borrowed, so that he was the only one to have his name on the loan cards for the book.
Hiroko later gave Itsuki a camera to take pictures of the school. On her old school visit, she meets an old teacher who takes her to the library. There she will be introduced to the schoolgirls who are now on library duty there. They report playing a game after which they try to find as many books as possible that Itsuki Fujii borrowed. They believe a boy who was in love with the female Itsuki Fujii wrote all the names. Itsuki learns from the teacher that the male Itsuki died in an accident two years ago.
Further in the memories, Itsuki tells how the male Itsuki once came to her home to bring a book that he had forgotten to return. The male Itsuki then left the school, but without giving notice. So this is Itsuki's last memory of Hiroko's late fiancé.
Now the storylines separate. While Hiroko and Akiba visit the scene of the accident, Itsuki's condition worsens dramatically. She appears to have carried pneumonia , has a very high fever, and passes out. Since the ambulance would take an hour due to a snow storm, the 76-year-old grandfather carries her to the hospital so that she survives.
At the end, Itsuki begins to write a letter about an event in the near past. The girls from the school library came to see her. They found the book Itsuki gave to give back at home before he left school. The girls refer to the back of the loan card. There is a drawing by Itsuki. Itsuki realizes that her schoolmate was in love with her after all and that Hiroko was not his first love, as he always said to her. The film then ends with Itsuki's words "Dear Watanabe Hiroko, I am too ashamed to send you this letter."
Web links
- Love Letter in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Japanese vampire seeks suicidal girls ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on live.shanghaidaily.com from June 26, 2011
- ↑ Korean Culture No.3 (p. 18) uploaded to scribd.com (2011)
- ↑ Awards for Love Letter on imdb.com
- ↑ (English subtitles: "Dear Watanabe Hiroko, I am too embarrassed to mail this letter to you" ).
