AllMovie

In preparing for this film, director Nobuhiro Suwa wrote an detailed script and then threw it away at the last moment. Instead, in a manner reminscient of Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes, he worked intensively with the actors to develop their characters and allowed the script to develop from there. Though the film appears to be a standard work of fiction depicting the slow collapse of a relationship between an out-of-work actor (Nishijima Hidetoshi) and his girlfriend (Yu Eri), the dialogue seems fresh and real, filled with sentences that trail off and the Japanese equivalent of "ums" and "ahs." At one point, the director breaks in and barks questions to the actors off-camera, throwing the film into that fuzzy zone between fiction and documentary. This impression is underscored by the handheld camerawork of Masaki Tamura, the cinematographer for legendary documentarist Shinsuke Ogawa.