At 30, Hanako is still single. A shame for her well-to-do Japanese family who multiplies arranged meetings so that she can get married. And when she thinks she has finally found in Koichiro the man of her life, she quickly understands that she is engaged in a marriage of convenience especially dedicated to preserving the privileges of their respective families. Moreover, her husband has not even thought of breaking up with Miki, the pretty student from a modest family that he frequents… Hanako’s surprise leaves room for a certain suspense because the young woman will try to make acquaintance with his rival. And the two young women, despite their differences in social status, will become friends…
Arranged marriage, a codified practice
Two women for one man in the midst of dread Aristocrats… The film is directed by a 39-year-old Japanese woman, Yukiko Sode, from a new generation of Japanese directors whose films we are just beginning to see in France. His film challenges and arouses curiosity for its description of romantic relationships that we no longer imagined to be so codified in Japan. Like the rules of theomiaithe famous “arranged marriage” very fashionable in the 1930s. The practice still concerns 6% of marriages in Japan, especially in the spheres of high society, where the transmission of power and money within families comfortable matters more than anything.
“My film is coming out at the right time, explains Yukiko Sode in the press kit, because people have finally begun to express openly that Japanese society – which is considered, wrongly, as not having any social classes – perhaps had some. be, anyway! Class discrimination, and discrimination between men and women do exist, and women are obviously the first victims. This awareness of the existence of these social class differences, and that some are very clearly privileged, is very recent among us. This is a very topical theme because we understand that there is no or no longer any social mobility. »
Yukiko Sode’s film echoes another film by a young Japanese director released in early March: Housewife by Yukiko Mishima, who declines the same theme of the place of women in today’s Japan, through a young mother who, re-crossing a love at university, sees her reborn, despite her husband’s reluctance , the desire to resume his profession as an architect… and, incidentally, his relationship with his former lover. A film that also questions the freedom that women are trying to acquire in a society that has corseted them for too long.
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new generation of female filmmakers in Japan? Yukiko Sode doesn’t really believe it. “The number of female directors is constantly growing, but they are often very young, often in their twenties. The older we get, the fewer female directors there are. Those who have children struggle to resume their activity afterwards. It is difficult for us to have a long career. »