Dari Marusan
Japan 2014, Izumi Takahashi, 103′
Dari, a young woman, is both deaf and a genius detective for lost pets, basically keeping afloat by herself the little agency she’s employed at. She seems to live a relatively normal life, getting engaged to her not very successful but loving boyfriend and chasing down lost cats. One day, she meets the very brusque Yoshikawa who ends up hiring her to find the parakeet he set free two years ago. But what he has lost is not really the pet.
Cinematically, this is nothing to write home about. If you’ve seen one low budget Asian artsy movie, you’ve seen them all.
Outside of depicting Dari’s attempt at a normal life and Yoshikawa’s attempts at bottling up his emotions, many scenes revolve around both of them clashing with each other. The trusting and empathetic Dari finds out easily that Yoshikawa is not really searching for his parakeet but rather for the almost normal life he had with his two best friends in a somehow stable love triangle that was destroyed by pure chance. Yoshikawa on the other end challenges Dari’s trusting demeanor, threatening her many times, coming close to molesting her, always stopping short with the reason that raping a disabled girl is “no fun”, this reopens the scars from her childhood, which she tried to hide by adopting the mean nickname Dari Marusan the other children gave her. (It is a play on Daruma-san, which is a rude slang term for someone deaf as Daruma dolls don’t have ears) Every time they meet they keep pushing each other’s buttons, trying to heal their emotional wounds. The exchanges vary from tense, to uncomfortable to challenging and while they’re not the most expertly written, they are quite entertaining if you like this sort of interaction.