First Love Quicktake: A Gritty, Violent, & Irreverent Crime Flick
Two boxers square-off in a crowded arena, unleashing skull-shattering blows until one man hits the mat. Just as one fighter collapses, the film cuts to a severed head rolling out of an alley like a bowling ball.
The head stops in the middle of the street with a sickly splat. The decapitated body shuffles around and drops as the camera zooms in tight on the head’s blinking face.
This carnage may sound like something from a drug-induced fever dream, but I’m describing the opening moments of Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike’s latest movie, First Love (Hatsukoi).
Miike is one of the most prolific directors in cinema history. With over 100 films under his belt, he has never been afraid to let his freak flag fly. Miike is most interested in testing boundaries and pushing limits.
Miike’s body of work includes many films that defy conventional labels. While First Love isn’t an extreme genre-bender, this comedy/romance/crime flick does check a lot of boxes.
“Takes the audience to some wild places.”
Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a promising young boxer with fists of steel. He doesn’t care about being flashy in the ring or getting profiled in sports magazines. All he wants to do is to demolish the competition to become the world’s greatest boxer.
So, when Leo gets knocked out early in a match, it rattles him to his core. Sensing something may be wrong, he undergoes an MRI, which confirms his suspicion. Leo has an inoperable mass at the base of his skull.
At the same time, Kase (Shôta Sometani), a Yakuza scumbag with big ambitions, embarks on a side-hustle. Kase decides to steal a drug shipment and pin it on a prostitute named Monica (Sakurako Konishi). Monica, by the way, is a drug addict who is haunted by visions of her ne’er-do-well father.
Leo knows he doesn’t have long to live, so he goes into no f*<ks mode. When Leo spots Monica in peril, he doesn’t hesitate to step in to protect her from Kase’s goon.
Suddenly, Leo and Monica are caught up in the middle of a gang war between the Yakuza and the Triads. If they have any hope of surviving, they must outrun gangs of thugs, the authorities, and a crooked cop.
First Love is a hard-boiled gangster flick with a gooey love story below its icy surface – it’s right there in the title. However, my biggest problem with this film is that I never believed the romance at the heart of the story.
“First Love checks a lot of boxes.”
Leo and Monica are two kindred spirits thrown together by fate, and their wild adventure makes one hell of a first date. Dodging bullets and ducking katana blades get the adrenaline pumping, which is quite a turn-on.
Leo and Monica are attractive people, so a lifetime of movies have conditioned us to expect them to fall for each other. Despite all that’s working in the lovers’ favour, I never felt any chemistry between the actors.
Monica is a trauma victim who spends the film fighting off horrible hallucinations. Kubota plays Leo as numb (he’s a cold fish even before discovering his brain tumour). There isn’t much time for flirting or selling us on their attraction.
Nevertheless, I rooted for these two lovebirds even though they never won me over. I wanted to see them win because of what they stand for: two people fighting to survive a tsunami of chaos.
Masa Nakamura’s insane script takes the audience to some wild places. Though convoluted, it’s not difficult to follow.
At first, the story serves up a host of cliches from other pulpy noirs like dangerous dames, seedy gangsters, and crooked cops. But then Miike kicks things into overdrive, introducing a one-armed gangster, a half-naked dancing apparition, and a brief animated sequence.
“If you like your crime capers full of action, you’ve come to the right place.”
If you like your crime capers full of action, you’ve come to the right place. First Love is chaotic, over-the-top, and full of explicit violence. (A decapitated head rolls down the street to kick things off, after all). The violent action sequences may be gritty and intense, but they lack panache.
Cinematographer Nobuyasu Kita captures most of the action in tight quarters. The shaking and rattling camera and the fast edits had me swept up in the action, even if I couldn’t make out what was happening on screen. What the fights lack in well-choreographed physicality, they make up for in visceral impact.
First Love is daring and irreverent with a nasty vicious streak – it makes excellent counterprogramming to dead-serious gangster “cinema” like The Irishman. Miike has delivered another scrappy, outside-the-box crime flick that radiates with his anarchic spirit.
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