‘Your Name’ Review: An absolute joy

Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name is the type of film one watches after an immense heartbreak.

Elegantly expressed through a tale that morphs from gender-bending comedy to a chase against time to save a town from catastrophe, its inimitable message of hope amid crisis is genuinely infectious. Easily, the film is required viewing in a year that is defined by its gloom and anguish. 

Sitcom to serious love

Your Name starts with its two star-crossed lovers switching bodies every few days.

Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a city boy who juggles his time studying to be an architect and working as a waiter for a restaurant. Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) lives in a quaint rural town that is surrounded by a lake. She dreams of switching her monotonous life as the daughter of the town mayor and granddaughter of the town priestess for an exciting life in Tokyo. However, when the two teenagers wake up occupying bodies that aren’t theirs, routines and personalities are bungled, leaving their friends confused by the drastic changes.

 

 

The humor here is the stuff of sitcoms. Shinkai cleverly wraps the film with as much levity as he can, making sure that he creates characters who seem ill-equipped for the responsibilities that they will be faced with eventually.

Given that there seems to be no solution to their body switching problem, they make rules just to ensure that their transitions are as seamless as possible. They start writing their experiences on each other’s arms or cellphones, making each of them susceptible to being charmed by each other’s idiosyncrasies. They slowly fall in love.

 

 

 

Triumph of love

From its innocent and seemingly juvenile beginnings, Your Name slowly but surely evolves into something with palpable gravity without ever losing its mirthful heart. Shinkai steers the narrative into bleaker territories, eventually touching on a natural disaster that threatens to permanently terminate the teenagers’ budding romance.

 

Shinkai doesn’t stop there. He navigates the story back to the central love story, dwelling on themes of fate and memory, on the triumph of love against time, against human frailty, against nature. All this, he assigns to two unlikely teenagers whose initial aspirations are mundane and immature.

The film’s portrayal of its more fantastical elements is something that is noteworthy. Instead of draping the entire narrative with robust depictions of magical details, Shinkai favors subtlety. He leaves a lot of the explanations to the supernatural things that are happening to his characters a mystery, allowing his gorgeous visuals to guide his audience into fully accepting his romantic world of star-crossed soul-mates being united by crashing comets.

Affecting throughout

Your Name is affecting all throughout.

It blends its mostly disparate pieces with astounding grace. It is a film that allows you to laugh, cry, fall in love, believe that a boy and a girl who haven’t seen each other but are already in love can cure a world of the sorrows of an unstoppable trauma. It is just that much of a joy to watch. – Rappler.com

 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.