‘She Taught Me Serendipity’ Director Ohku Akiko Reframes the Boy-Meets-Girl Formula: ‘He’ll Have to Remember How He Hurt Someone’
Ohku Akiko’s Tokyo competition title “She Taught Me Serendipity” seems to fit right in with the director’s signature romantic drama genre style. That is a flavor Ohku has made her own through a succession of films that blend comedy and pathos, relatable protagonists and universal themes that have appealed to audiences worldwide.
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Based on a novel by comic Fukutoku Shusuke, her latest, Ohku says in an interview at the Tokyo International Film Festival’s main Hibiya Midtown venue, “is more autobiographical than usual – I feel I’m telling my story.” But instead of the twenty-something heroines who have centered many of her previous films, including her 2017 Tokyo audience award winner “Tremble All You Want,” her protagonist in “Serendipity” is a nerdy male college student, called Konishi, played by Hagiwara Riku. “I’d had a male hero in a short film, but never in a feature before this one,” Ohku says.
Konishi, however, shares screen time with two strongly individual women – Kawai Yuumi’s Hana, a lonely-looking classmate who more than matches him in the oddity department and seems to be his soulmate, and Ito Aoi’s Sacchan, a budding musician who works with him at a public bath and has a secret crush on him. “In a boy-meets-girl film like this one usually only the boy’s side is depicted, but I didn’t like that,” says Ohku. “I wanted to show the essences of the girls he meets and how much one is hurt by the boy.”
In the case of the effervescent-but-sensitive Sacchan, Ohku expressed that essence by writing a lengthy monologue that Ito delivers in one tour de force burst. “Those long lines of Sacchan’s were what first attracted me in the novel, so I wrote the script without changing the novel’s flavor,” says Ohku. “In fact, I could tell when I first read it that I didn’t want to change it.” They also help make “Serendipity” a formula-defying standout.
The film’s message, says Ohku, is that “You have to live your life being aware of the fact that you have hurt people.” “In the novel Konishi gets married, but I don’t know what will happen to him in the future,” she continues. “What I do know is that he’ll remember how he hurt someone. That’s the kind of thing you never forget.”
Following the film’s world premiere at a TIFF screening on Tuesday, Ohku says that she spent about an hour signing autographs and speaking with fans. “One girl from China told me that today had been the best secret of her life,” she says without elaborating.
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