Last spring NHK Premium launched a 4-part live-action television drama based on Tagame Gengoroh-sensei’s manga Otouto no Otto (published in English by Pantheon as My Brother’s Husband.) This drama starred Sato Ryuuya as Yaichi, the protagonist and Baruto (Kaido Höövelson) a Sumo wrestler from Estonia, as Mike Flanagan, the man who married Yaichi’s brother and who bring chaos into his quiet life. 

The Otouto no Otto TV Drama (弟の夫) follows the books fairly closely. Canadian Mike Flanagan arrives at Yaichi’s door on a trip to visit his late husband’s hometown. Yaichi’s daughter, Kana, is ecstatic to find she has an uncle and a foreign one at that, and insists Mike stay at their home. With Mike’s presence a palpable reminder of his failure to stay connected to his brother, Yaichi finds his values challenged and is made very aware of his own, albeit passive, homophobia. The harder he is pushed by other’s people more overt homophobia, the more his own implicit homophobia is uncovered. In the mean time, Mike is able to provide a role model and advice to a young man in the town who knows he’s gay, and meets a former classmate of his husband Ryouji’s, a deeply closeted man who own internal fear makes Mike uncomfortable. 

By the end of Mike’s stay, we can see that Yaichi has grown in his understanding and acceptance of his brother and, although it’s too late for Ryouji, it might not be too late for the next kid in town. 

The dialogue cleaves closely to the original, with one notable omission. In the beginning when she meets Mike, Kana says that it’s weird that Japan won’t allow same-sex marriage (not in those words, the line was closer to “it’s weird that they can’t here.”) This line was scrubbed from the drama, presumably as it was too close to a criticism of the Japanese government’s policies and NHK is Japan’s national public broadcasting organization funded by public fees. It is pretty amazing that NHK aired this, but….let’s also remember it aired on a pay cable channel, not one of the main network channels. I had written NHK to ask if they planned on airing this on the USA-based NHK cable network TV Japan, but they said flat out they had no intention of doing so. So I’d count this a half step, rather than a full step forward for representation on Japanese TV. 

The DVD comes with a director interview as an extra. There are no subtitles for the audio track, but if you’ve read the books, you can follow the dialogue without problem.

The cinematography is very small and claustrophic, without being intrusive. It gives a feeling of being in the room with the characters, without being up into their faces. Sato Ryuuya was excellent as Yaichi (and as Ryouji for a few scenes) and really communicated all the many layers of discomfort he was feeling.  Nemoto Maharu was a fantastic Kana. It’s a pretty pivotal role, as she has to say what the audience is thinking most of the time. And Baruto did a pretty good job, considering he’s a sumo wrestler, not an actor and not Canadian. His English is heavily accented, but you know what? Who cares. ^_^

A friend of mine who is deeply embedded in the Japanese LGBTQ community said that they had heard this drama wasn’t that good, but we discussed that this drama wasn’t targeted to the LGBTQ community, as such. It was about them, as so many LGBTQ-themed works are. It was targeted to a straight, mainstream audience of nice people, family people, good people who just happen to have a lot of deeply held opinions about why being gay is bad and will make you live a short, unhappy life (in part, from decades of late-night TV specials about being gay in Japan.) On the other side of this, a Japanese acquaintance – who is admittedly rather more worldly than many other people – commented that they liked the drama quite a bit. They represented the presumed audience much more closely, I believe, than anyone in the LGBTQ community. Nonetheless one cannot draw conclusion from an n of 2 and your mileage may vary considerably, depending on what you expect from this drama.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

From my perspective, as an adaptation of what is a fairy tale about the gap between tolerance and acceptance and how much unpleasant shit lives in that gap, this was a very well done television drama. 

If you’ve been a reader of Okazu for any length of time, you’ll know that pretty much the only time I ever watch movies is when I’m on a plane. ^_^ And, as I have spent quite a lot of time on planes recently, I have some thoughts about two gay movies that were released recently, Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon. Both have received critical acclaim and criticism and, having watched both, I wanted to take a stab at addressing the positive and negative issues I found with both narratives, in the context of  them being a gay movie in 2018. 

First of all, on the very positive side, neither of these movies would have been likely to be made before now. The conflicts are non-existent, external homophobia is all but completely stripped from the narratives. More importantly, look back at that first line – I watched both of these on a plane. In 2018, United Airlines felt perfectly comfortable making these movies available on their flights. For someone who remembers the controversy when an airline let the 1997 movie In and Out on their entertainment system, (a movie with one kiss at the very end) this was a very palpable reminder that things have changed. 

Call Me By Your Name takes place in a somewhat timeless 1980s, as Elio, the talented son of two talented professors summers in Italy with his family. When grad student Oliver stays with them to work on his research and assist Elio’s father, Oliver and Elio fall in love. I had a very hard time empathizing with Elio or liking Oliver. Elio’s infatuation with Oliver is believable enough, but his casual neglect of a local girl he is dating made it very hard to care about him.  The presumption has to be that Oliver and Elio must keep their relationship private, although Elio’s parents are shown repeatedly to be open-minded. When Elio finally admits what he’s feeling, they are completely supportive. The local girl also lets Elio off the hook, which frees him to wallow in his own emotions.

The entire move felt too aloof from itself for me to engender any emotion in me. Even the titular scene simply made no sense to me. No context is provided for why calling each other by their own name might be seen as especially intimate. Additionally, Oliver looks to be in his late 20s and I’m always concerned about stories that portray adults who ‘fall in love” with adolescents. Elio isn’t especially mature. Throughout the movie, he’s an awkward adolescent. I find it hard to sympathize with any adult who looks at a half-baked awkward kid and does not think, “Nope.” On a much more banal note, in scene after scene we are assured that Oliver and Elio’s father are doing “research” but I was unable to identify any particular subject they were researching. Could have been science or mathematics or literature or art or archeology. That was a tad vexxing. Pick one.

The very last few scenes, after Elio and Oliver part, finally, finally gave me some genuine emotion. Elio’s family wrapping around him, allowing him to feel and experience this love and loss were the best part of the movie. 

In the end, I felt that I had witnessed someone’s intensely personal experiences, but that I felt almost nothing about them.

Love, Simon presented a completely different raft of problems. Simon is a closeted teen in an affluent and diverse town. When an anonymous classmate comes out on a school BBS, Simon reaches out, also anonymously. He and “Blue” develop a friendship online, while Simon tries to figure out who his confidant is. Due to a lapse of judgement, Simon’s secret is found out by a manipulative and desperate classmate, who blackmails Simon into setting him up with a friend. To do this, Simon is required to keep his friend from asking his other friend out and to do this, he sets his best friend up with the guy, all so he can sell his female friend’s happiness for his own protection. 

Ultimately the whole thing comes apart, and his friends are rightfully angry at Simon for using them as pawns. But they and the school rally around Simon and Blue and, ultimately there is a happy ending for them. 

There were so many things wrong with this sweet gay romance I wanted to scream. As each of them was addressed in the narrative, I felt a little better, but the main problem was never touched on.

-WHY?-

Simon has an openly liberal, white, affluent family; he lives in a liberal, affluent diverse town. His friends would clearly not reject him, his family would very obviously be 100% behind him. It’s 2018. There’s no stigma. No homophobia. He is protected in every way from any negative consequences of coming out. There is literally not one good reason presented as to why Simon, a presumably nice person, would literally spend weeks manipulating and lying to friends rather than just look at his blackmailer and say “publish and be damned.” The only possible lesson we can take from this is that Simon is….a weak jerk. He’s not a good guy. He’s not a nice person. Simon is a person who, when faced with crisis will literally destroy other people’s lives to protect himself.  And yet, we are supposed to root for him in his romance and forgive him his trespasses against the people who trusted him. Um…

In his review of Love, Simon, Daniel D’Addario asks if we need a gay teen romance. Backlash was hard, as people ran to the defense of the movie – of course, we need gay romances and happy endings! But, I have to ask, do we need them to follow the convention of externalized/internalized homophobia even when no such pressure exists? Why does Simon do what he does? Where does his internalized homophobia come from and why is it enough of a motivator for him to actively attempt to manipulate (and sell! He is selling his female friend to a manipulating jerk!) his friends? 

Love, Simon is a nice romance, if you ignore that Simon is not at all a nice person. It’s practically Shakesperian in scope and plot, and about as satisfying.

There is a lot of room to explore human failings in gay romance. And, I think it’s a very good thing that we have two such stories available to us this year, but neither addresses the nature of those failings except in the most facile way. 

We definitely need gay teen romance, but I’m not sure we need to have them with the lingering vestiges of homophobia that we, as adults, felt, when teens. Kids nowadays are capable of growing up without them. As with science fiction, I believe the role of feel-good-romance movies can (and, arguably, ought to) be showing us a better world; one that exists when these  things are past and we no longer even remember what it was like. 

Both of these movies had good moments, but both really needed to be removed from their makers’ assumption that characters live in fear, self-loathing and self-doubt, for them to make any sense.

Ratings:

Call Me By Your Name:
Cinematography – 8
Acting- 7
Story – 6
Characters – 6 Predictably, I like the local girl best and was glad to see her out of that mess
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 6

Love, Simon:
Cinematography – 7 Very MTV
Acting – 8
Story – 7
Characters – 8 
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 7 It would have been an 8, except for that litttttle problem of Simon selling a female friend to a blackmailer for no fucking good reason.

I’m going to make a point of watching Blue is the Warmest Color before the end of summer. While I’m being fundamentally dissatisfied with flawed LGBTQ movies, I might as well go for a trifecta. ^_^ I’ll be back next week with a great summer LGBTQ read to ease our hearts. ^_^