JFF Theater: MY BROKEN MARIKO Review: The Everlasting Bond of True Friendship.
Shiino is a sullen office worker exploited by her boss, who discovers through the news that her best friend, Mariko, has just committed suicide. After the initial shock, Shiino decides to steal her friend’s ashes from her abusive father, to embark on a journey with her and discover the reasons behind her death.
Based on the manga of the same name written by Waka Hirako, My broken Mariko is an emotional story of friendship in the form of road movie, which delves into the complicated intricacies of the human psyche, showing the strong bond of friendship between the two main characters through multiple flashbacks, which lead us through the unstable fractures in Mariko‘s soul, after a life of suffering, towards that fatal outcome that not even the strong bond of friendship that united her to Shiiro could avoid.
“My Broken Mariko” ends up being a moving story to which its two main actresses provide the heartbreaking emotion that its director, Yukie Tanada, responsible for other small gems of independent Japanese cinema such as “One Million Yen Girl”, seeks to provoke in the audience.
For this story, Tanada invites us to be the silent companions of the protagonist, on a trip that, beyond distances, becomes a journey of self-discovery that leads us to understand that living remembering the people who have passed away is always the best way to keep them alive forever.
The film will be available until May,1, 2025, with multi-subtitles in The Japanese Foundation´s free streaming platform, JFF Theater.
