Title: Mukashi no otoko / 昔の男
Rating: 4 / 10
Recommended for:
For those who want to watch an erotic/adult story about people who go crazy for love and/or like stories about people having affairs but masked as pure love
AND/OR
Those who want to see the key cast members i.e. Fujiwara Norika, Oosawa Takao, Abe Hiroshi and Tomita Yasuko from 24 years ago in a messy romance story
* Potential spoilers ahead!
* I had actually watched this before a long time ago but didn't remember the details.
Liked:
- Oosawa Takao + Abe Hiroshi exuding a lot of sexy charm from 24 years ago is probably going to be a huge draw for the female viewers. As for the guys, there is Fujiwara Norika looking hot and gorgeous and Tomita Yasuko with a demure and beautiful look (not when her character goes crazy though).
- This being an adult love story and that there was quite a fair bit of attention on the physical attraction and desire between the characters, it was no wonder that there were a lot of intimate scenes. While I thought that there were too many at some point because it got so repetitive, I guess the sole saving grace was that they didn't go too big on the nudity so it didn't feel like a porn flick.
- Tomita's acting definitely outshone everyone else in the cast. Not an easy role to play because it would feel fake if she went too overboard so I thought that she did very well with maintaining a fine balance between the different facades of her character.
Disliked:
- You might arrive at different conclusions and views on this drama depending on at which age or life stage when you watched this and/or in which era. Back then when this first aired, although I don't quite remember how I came across this drama and the details of the story, I do have a vague impression that I was pretty shocked by this. Not sure if it was due to the scriptwriter Uchidate Makiko's style of storytelling but I think I had a similar shocking experience when I watched another drama from her i.e. "Kegareta shita" in 2005. That was even more extreme than this drama, if I must say.
I was not an adult yet when this drama aired so I think my interpretation of the storyline and the characters naturally differed from how I look it at it now. There were probably many like me at that time who might wanted the lead characters to be together happily ever after despite the mess they created in the process. However, the me in 2025 just cannot see the lead couple in the same light anymore because the tinted glasses which I saw them through due to the way the story was crafted are gone. Perhaps it's due to having seen so many fictional and real-life affair stories in the Japanese entertainment scene over the past two decades that it has "opened up my eyes" to the problematic, immoral and sometimes evil behaviour which many of the characters engaged in. As such, it was difficult for me to feel for the characters, much less rooting for them.
I failed to comprehend how the lead couple could be having an affair so openly and selfishly while the people around them somehow facilitated or egged them or sort of turned a blind eye to what was going on. The mother-in-law who didn't blame her son for having an affair but directed criticism at the daughter-in-law? And what's with the boyfriend and the ex-boyfriend sitting together to have drinks in a pub talking about the same woman they were sleeping with?! A woman feeling like she got spurned but actually the man had never even expressed any interest in her before and it was one-sided on her part all along? And the current boyfriend helping the girlfriend go to taunt the ex-boyfriend so that the latter could be seduced by her again? All these things made it rather impossible for me to like this drama and instead, I found myself shaking my head at how ridiculous and nonsensical some of these developments were.
While I might have thought in the past that Tomita's character as the cheated on wife was largely at fault for "indirectly" causing her husband's infidelity, I think that the other side of the story which might not have been apparent to my younger self had become more obvious and understandable to me now. If I was writing this review after the first time I watched this drama, I might have kinder words for it though.
No comments:
Post a Comment