NYAFF/Japan Cuts Review: Boys on the Run

It’s not often that a coming-of-age story revolves around a 29-year-old chronic masturbator who still lives with his mom, but that’s just one example of the many ways Daisuke Miura's Boys on the Run is refreshingly atypical. The film is based on a manga by Kengo Hanazawa which was originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Spirits from 2005-2008, and although the adaptation is fairly loyal visually, the overall tone has been changed both in how the characters behave and how the story arc is presented.

When we first meet our hapless hero, Tanishi (Kazunobu Mineta), he’s spending his 29th birthday in a telekura, arranging to meet a woman who turns out to be rather large and extremely disgruntled by his unenthusiastic reaction to her. After surviving a mild beating, he just barely manages to make a run for it down the streets of Ikebukuro.

As one might expect from this inauspicious intro, just about every aspect of Tanishi’s shallow life is subpar, from his career selling vending machine prizes to his nonexistent sex life. The only things he really has going for him seem to be a few like-minded colleagues at the office and his budding friendship with Chiharu (Mei Kurokawa), a long-time crush who works in his company’s product planning division. Better yet, she genuinely seems to like him back.

Tanishi proceeds to make a plethora of horrifying mistakes while trying to woo Chiharu which would have most girls in her position running for the hills, but for some reason she stays interested. Unfortunately, the final straw is pulled when Tanishi is caught in a compromising position with Chiharu’s call girl neighbor Shiho (YOU) at the very moment she was preparing to confess her love for him.

Weeks later, Tanishi finds out Chiharu, who’d been avoiding him like the plague since the incident, is now dating his supposed friend Aoyama (Ryuhei Matsuda), a salesman for a rival company. Ultimately, Aoyama isn’t even all that interested in Chiharu beyond the initial rush of stealing someone’s girl, and ends up callously dumping her after getting her pregnant. This sets up a situation in which Tanishi decides to fight for Chiharu’s honor, even after she tells him it won’t make her stop hating him. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and Tanishi begins getting boxing lessons from a stoic, beer-swilling co-worker in preparation for the big grudge match.

The theme of the story, it would seem, is that men really have no set age to grow up -- it just happens whenever we decide to take life seriously, whether that occurs at 18 or 30. In a time when the age of perceived adulthood inches further upward, this could technically qualify as a coming-of-age youth film. In the end, Tanishi’s quest isn’t really about winning Chiharu back, or even beating up Aoyama -- it’s about him becoming fully committed to something and following through. At 29, he actually needs to go through every bit of this self-induced trauma to finally break free of his prolonged adolescence.

Mineta, a punk rock frontman by trade, really lets loose in his portrayal of Tanishi as he’s driven to the brink by love. It’s actually a refreshing change of pace from what has become standard in Japanese dramas, which generally depict women as flighty lunatics in matters of love as the men they’re pursuing respond with aloofness ranging anywhere from mildly frustrating to downright excruciating. Tanishi is a character with no internal filter, blurting out whatever he feels the moment it pops into his hormone-clouded mind and acting on raw impulse. In Freudian terms, he's all id. In the manga, readers were privy to his dweebish, analytical reactions to everything via wordy thought bubbles and narration boxes; in this version, Mineta emotionally eviscerates himself in a way seldom seen in modern Japanese film. Sure, there are emotional outbursts in just about every big-budget summer movie, but rarely are actors so openly vulnerable.

While the rites of male passage theme may not resonate with everyone, especially women, the film still shines as a tremendously awkward sex comedy. Tanishi’s courting process begins by accidentally loaning Chiharu a zoophilia porn DVD and things only go downhill from there, culminating with quite possibly the greatest "slow clap" scene ever captured on celluloid. There’s something oddly uplifting about watching someone unwittingly sabotage themselves at every opportunity while hopelessly stumbling through life, if for no other reason than it makes our own embarrassments and failures seem less significant in comparison. Yet, at the same time, we also root for Tanishi, because like his elder co-workers, we understand that love turns every guy into an irrational idiot at least once. We can only hope that when the moment of truth finally arrives, we’re able to deal with it half as well as he eventually does.

Boys on the Run will be screened at the New York Asian Film Festival on June 28th and Japan Cuts on July 4th.

• 
  Trailer - Boys on the Run (2010) [English-subtitled]
  Posted: October 7, 2009
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