Tonda kappuru

Sōmai’s debut established all of the typical elements of the director’s style and the characteristic attributes of all of his later films, starting with the screenplays based on popular books, excellent casting and his work with young actors, to his formalistic trademarks including long shots, inventively designed dolly shots, transitions from diegetic to subjective sound and the expressive use of the natural elements, particularly rain. Primarily, however, The Terrible Couple established the director’s empathy toward the characters, especially the adolescents, thanks to which this adaptation of Kimi Yanagisawa’s manga about the unplanned cohabitation of two high-school students in the same house becomes a sort of teenage variation on Scenes from a Marriage. The narrative gradually shifts from initial rambunctiousness and light-heartedness to a stifling relationship drama weighed down with emotions, deliberate hurtful behaviour between the characters and missed opportunities. The film begins and ends with the protagonist looking into the camera, but what he and the other three main characters experience and the personal development they undergo between these two points in the narrative is almost incredible. Sōmai excellently depicts the unbearable tension between the adolescent characters’ feelings and the dread that they might reveal them to someone. The basic premise, in which the room of an adolescent boy who lives in his uncle’s house while attending school is sublet to his classmate, is used to create a world where seemingly only high-school students and their teachers exist, but there are no other adults. This situation is further intensified when the adolescent protagonists are allowed to interact in situations similar to adult cohabitation, while being buffeted by teenage emotions in combination with timidity, insecurity and stubborn denial of their true feelings. (04.07.2022)