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| Ren Tamura and Miyabi Ichijo in Bye Bye Love |
Cast: Ren Tamura, Miyabi Ichijo, Atsuko Ami, Yuzo Morita, Satomi Oki, Enver Tenpai. Screenplay: Isao Fujisawa. Cinematography: Norimoto Ichinose. Art direction: Shinichi Otani. Film editing: Eiko Yoshida, Hisako Aizawa.
Two young people go on the run when one of them shoots the man the other was living with, an official in the American embassy in Japan. The familiar fugitive road movie formula has caused Isao Fujisawa's Bye Bye Love to be compared to several films that are roughly of its era, like Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965), and Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973). But the treatment of gender identity in Bye Bye Love makes it feel ahead of its time: One of the fugitives has chosen a female persona. The shooter, who calls himself Utamaro (Ren Tamura), is a cocky young nihilist who first encountered his fugitive partner, Giko (Miyabi Ichijo), fleeing from a street cop. Utamaro interfered, knocked the cop out and stole his gun. Giko and Utamaro turn out to be the perfect team: After the initial surprise, Utamaro isn't bothered by Giko's gender fluidity, and Giko isn't bothered by Utamaro's nihilism. Fujisawa's only fiction film was thought to be lost since it first appeared, but a negative was discovered in 2018, and it has continued to astonish new audiences since then. Fujisawa delights in off-beat choices: The music track that accompanies the pair's flight is organ music by Bach, and there's a threesome with a prostitute that is literally shocking. (It involves electric wires and a radio.) Not everything in the movie works -- the murdered official is heavy-handedly named Nixon -- and it risks associating queerness with criminality, but so much of it does that Bye Bye Love is one of the most fascinating rediscoveries of recent years.
