As sure as spring follows winter, this time of year always seems to bring a fresh crop of romantic dramas to Japanese screens, each of them ripe with sentiment and practically choking on cherry blossoms. Later this month, viewers can sob themselves silly over Netflix¡¯s ¡°Love Like the Falling Petals,¡± but in the meantime there¡¯s the tastefully lachrymose ¡°The Last 10 Years.¡±
Michihito Fujii¡¯s film is adapted from a novel by the late Ruka Kosaka, which drew on the author¡¯s experiences of living with a terminal illness. It¡¯s an odd choice for a director accustomed to more cerebral fare, and Fujii ¡ª reuniting with some of the production team from his earlier films ¡°A Family¡± and ¡°The Journalist¡± ¡ª sometimes seems to be working at cross-purposes with the material.
Nana Komatsu stars as Matsuri, a young woman with a rare lung disorder that has left her with only another decade of life. Rather than checking items off her bucket list, she takes a vow of romantic abstinence, only to have her resolve tested when she¡¯s reunited with an old classmate, Kazuto (Kentaro Sakaguchi).
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