FilmBah Watches: My Darling is a Foreigner (ダーリンは外国人)

At first glance, I could have thought My Darling is a Foreigner (ダーリンは外国人) is a romantic comedy that plays on the cross cultural differences of your typical Japanese family having to accept a Westerner as an in-law, which could be fun. But this adaptation of Saori Oguri's manga which is based on her own marriage to an American who is half-Hungarian and half-Italian, is a slow and progressively heartwarming romantic drama that offers no deeper insight other than its shallow conclusion that love is about having differences.

I find that first time director Kazuaki Ue's grasp of pacing is a little lacking here, as some of the scenes are needlessly resolved slowly, but the narrative, particularly the arc that leads to the romance of Saori and Tony, is rushed so that it can get into the turbulence of the barriers that they would face in gaining their families' blessing and approval, except that that gets rushed as well and doesn't turn out to be a major issue for the couple. Saori's parents, played by Jun Kunimura and Shinobu Otake, who I was expecting to be the central conflict against the relationship were not given the right amount of screen time to raise the stakes for the emotional climax, and the quick death of the father doesn't bring a serious impact. This is hurt even further with the already relative short run time of the movie, as scenes become wasted and it could have used to create deeper empathy for the characters.

Kazuaki does add something to the table by making use of  mixed formats of having small interview segments of actual Japanese women married to foreign men and animated inserts from the cutely drawn caricatures from Saori's manga, but doesn't fully expound on its full potential to be any insightful, other than to lighten up its slow pace.

This should have been funnier than it looks

The ultimate saving grace for this movie, however, is Mao Inoue, who I hadn't seen since Rebirth (八日目の蝉). She is the screen darling and she gives it a heart to what would I would have dismissed as a thoroughly dull progression as the relationship begins to fall apart (more of indifference between the characters, rather than their cultural differences). Given the not thought out script that constraints her character to be one dimensional, she works because of her adorable temperament and knows how to shed a few tears when it counts. Even with a slightly stilted performance from Jonathan Sherr; a long-time resident of Japan himself, he serves as a serviceable male lead with a heart of glass and his fluency of Japanese makes him sound less skin crawling.

It is a little disappointing and unbelievable that My Darling is a Foreigner has a lot less to offer given its subject that could be explored more widely from a real life examples, but the chemistry between Jonathan Sherr and Mao Inoue is where the heart of this movie is, that is able to make me feel a littler warmer inside by the end, instead of throwing this out as a dud.