Title: Be With You aka Ima, Ai ni Yukimasu
Genre: Drama/Romance
Director: Nobuhiro Doi
Format: Movie, 119 minutes.
Dates: 30 October 2004

Synopsis: When two souls find one another, nothing can tear them apart. Widower Takumi lives a quiet life with his six-year-old son Yuji after the loss of wife and mother Mio. Yuji unfailingly remembers her promise to him: “I’ll be with you again in a year’s time, when the rains come.” On the first anniversary of her passing, Takumi and Yuji are taking a walk in the woods when they come across a woman sheltering from a monsoon downpour. She bears an uncanny resemblance to Mio, but has no recollection of who she is or what she is doing there. Family life resumes from where they left off, while Takumi and Mio’s memories of their first encounter in high school come flooding back. However, their new life together is interrupted by the discovery of Mio’s old diary, which reveals the secrets of her past and how they must say goodbye once more in six weeks time…

The Highlights
Cinematography: Nobuhiro Doi… enough said.
Story: A very intimate experience, going beyond the basic jun’ai formula.
Cast: Lives in the world rather than acts in it; the child actor is particularly good.

2004 was the year of the “jun’ai”, or “Pure Love” boom, epitomized by that spearhead of the K-Wave, Winter Sonata. But while the Koreans were stunning middle-aged women the world over with their romance dramas, their Japanese brethren had not been idle either. 2004 was also known as the year that a new genre was defined, by two future classics of Japanese film. And Be With You is one of them, the other being the even more popular Crying Out Love, In The Center Of The World.

Though an example of Japanese jun’ai, Be With You takes a somewhat different tack from its better-known contemporaries. It does talk about love, but unlike other jun’ai works, its discourse on love is not limited to the love between a man and a woman; it is a look into the love between a husband and a wife, between a mother and her child, and between everyone in a family. The source material is thus richer than the average jun’ai story, for the anguish of loss is all the more poignant, and the feeling of emptiness is all the greater, for the fact that it is not an individual, but a family, suffering from the absence of a loved one. And it also makes for an even more satisfying ending, for it is not an individual, but a family that learns to cope with the loss, and look forward to the future with the knowledge that love never dies.

For a film debut, Nobuhiro Doi shows his mettle as a director with aplomb; the cinematography is astoundingly beautiful, with most of the scenes set around a beautiful forest close to the Aio family home. Nobuhiro also creates a certain magical feeling to the world in which the film takes place, with the usage of the rain season as the backdrop to the six-week miracle that serves as the basis of the story. The result is a world that feels like it is intimately tied in with the miracle, and one cannot help but be drawn in by the magic woven by Nobuhiro, a magic that defies any attempt at definition.

And while Nakamura Shido and Takeuchi Yuuko were splendid in their roles of Takumi and Mio respectively, it has to be said that they were simply outshone by Takei Akashi, the child actor playing the role of their six-year-old son Yuji. Indeed, with him playing a Yuji who’s every bit a young boy delighted to have his mother back yet wise enough to know what’s coming, Takei is arguably what makes Be With You so special as a jun’ai piece in relation to all other works of the same genre; with the presence of Yuji in the storyline, Be With You goes from just being a jun’ai piece to a touching portrayal of familial love. Yuji is probably the one reason why I would actually rate this film higher than the other great jun’ai piece of 2004.

All in all, it can be said that one knows a Japanese film is truly a classic if it has inspired a foreign-language remake, as was the case with Shall We Dance?, which inspired a Hollywood remake starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, as well as Crying Out Love, In The Center Of The World itself, which inspired a Korean remake titled My Girl And I starring Korean sweetheart Song Hye Gyo. Similarly, Be With You has inspired a 2008 Hollywood remake in the making; that just goes to show how good a story it must be.

What if you got a taste of the days when your most beloved was still around? More importantly…what if a taste is all you have left?

The Rating: 10

Reviewed by: Ascaloth