The household title of the second film is designed to soften the genre eclecticism of the predecessor. Being in the form of a teenage drama, this picture annoyingly brings us back to the very episode in the subway, when, counting to three, 54 schoolgirls together took the last step in their lives. But now it is not a tense outside look of the policeman, and foggy with excitement glasses, through which the ordinary provincial dummy Noriko from high school looks uncertainly at her confessions presented to the monitor of a virtual friend.
The heroines of the Virgin suicides simply did not have the Internet, Sono is sure. Otherwise, changing their names to some Marilyn, they would easily be freed from their chilling depth of maiden thoughts. So the most ordinary, as a table, Noriko, becomes incomprehensible to herself conqueror of the capital Mitsuko, getting involved in a completely incomprehensible, but exciting game of reincarnation.
With the maximalism of the young man and the determination of the monk, Sono’s heroes go all in, rejecting the rotten reality of strained smiles on family photos and painted behavior for years to come. The lucky crown of which is tightened by a stranglehold at the daily rite at the dining table. The feeling of emptiness of its simple world pushes the characters of the film to quite Nietzschean philosophical experiments, in which the perfectionism of a new image may even be above life.
The slowness of the confessions in the long monologues of Noriko, then her family members, stretches over almost the entire film. Sono seems to collect a stunning emotional puzzle of other people's memories, each new fragment of which is brighter and more unexpected than the previous one.
8 out of 10
Original