Koi ni Itaru Yamai (The end of Puberty, ?????)
Japan 2011, Kimura Shoko, 116′
Madoka is an absolute failure as a biology teacher. No one respects him, playing around during his class. The only exception is Tsubura, a girl who literally obsesses about him and knows everything about his mannerisms and behaviour. One day she seizes the chance to attack him and after the resulting sex it turns out they swapped genitals. Madoka takes her to his ancestral home in the middle of nowhere to hide from the world. They are soon found by En, Tsubura’s promiscuous but emotionally void best friend who thinks she loves Tsubura and Maru, En’s childhood friend who is both a virgin and hopelessly in love with her and constantly tries to get En out of her sexualised apathy.
Oh boy, there is nothing more annoying than teenagers throughout puberty. We are not spared any emotional outburst or selfishness from any of the kids which at times gets a little unbearable. However in all its improbability and archetypical characters it is a quite beautiful and accurate story about the hopelessly jumbled maze of feelings puberty is for many people. The director said that all main characters are based either on her personal experiences or people she has been very close to. Also, the title of today’s post is the main character’s names; all of them can be written with the character ? which means “round” (or Yen, if you read it as ‘en’) and signifies that she sees all of them as part of one round, harmonic being.
The visuals were very mature for a feature film debut: Nearly all shots seemed deliberately framed and accentuated the mood well. The director also made the deliberate choice to give tsubura very bright floral, often red dresses most of the time, while En’s clothes all consisted of shades of beige and gray; important exception being her always flawlessly matching lingerie sets in bright pastel colors.
Nearly all of the music and the very deliberate sound effects consisted of chiptunes, which was supposed to evoke a feeling of Tsubura’s childishness and robotically immature feelings. Consequently both effects and music became almost completely absent in the latter part of the film. Accidentally, we can learn from this movie that the usage of “Freude schöner Götterfunken” is 90% less tacky if used as chiptune!