Mizuki’s life sucks. First, her mother commits suicide when she is just a child, when her mother finds out that her father is cheating on her. Then she has a boyfriend who regularly cheats on her, then begs for forgiveness and a second chance. Thirdly, her father has married his long-time mistress, and she and her daughter live with Mizuki and her father...while trying to hide the fact that the girl is the father’s child, Mizuki’s half-sister.
On her 19th birthday, Mizuki learns that her boyfriend, Tomoki, has strayed again, this time with Mizuki’s best friend, Aya. She angrily storms out of the mod motorcycle club where Tomoki and his friends hang out, resolved to break with him for good. Then she hears a familiar melody, one that she has been trying to play on the piano for years, as she looks above at the waning moon, at the last quarter. Following the sound, it leads her to a mysterious mansion, where she finds a man playing a guitar. He claims to know her, that his name is Adam and that he comes from London. The two instantly bond as kindred spirits.
As the days go by, Mizuki disconnects from the world outside of the mansion, refusing to answer her cellphone with calls from her step-mother, Tomoki and Aya. Instead, she plays over and over again the melody on an upstairs piano. Then Adam doesn’t show up one night. Instead, he calls her, telling her that if she wants to go with him, meet him at the junction by the museum, but be there before the moon disappears. Thinking that he is taking her to London, Mizuki sneaks into her house to get her passport, then hurries to the meeting spot. She finally sees the ghostly outline of Adam as the world slows down. Mizuki walks out into traffic, seeing only Adam, just as Tomoki, on a drunken bender, sees her. He calls out to her, she turns and is hit by a truck.
From here, the story takes a turn towards the supernatural as the comatose Mizuki, trapped between life and death, meets Hotaru, a high school student who also had a traffic accident at the same time while searching for her cat, Sybelle. As Mizuki has lost her memory, Hotaru and her schoolmate Masaki name her Eve, as the only thing she remembers is that she was looking for Adam. Hotaru and Miura take over the reins of the story, as they search for clues on her true identity, with the help of Tomoki, who just wants Mizuki back. What they discover is a story of lost love and reincarnation with roots in the past 19 years ago, when the moon was last in this exact same phase.
Last Quarter is a live-action adaptation of Ai Yazawa’s manga of the same name, so this film will be of interest for fans of Paradise Kiss and NANA, although changes have been made, such as aging Hotaru from an elementary girl to a high school girl, and turning Hotaru’s girlfriend Sae into the boy Masaki. It will also catch the eye of fans of J-Rock, as L’arc~en~Ciel vocalist hyde plays the role of Adam. He does a fairly good job, as the role doesn’t require much beyond looking like a mysterious bad boy and playing a guitar. He comes off as sexy as Johnny Depp, but hyde’s acting is very stilted during the videotape sequences of Adam during his life as a rock star. The film uses hyde’s “The Cape of Storms” repeatedly as a motif, which may get on your nerves upon the twentieth rendition. Personally, I like the song. I thought it suited the film well.
For fans of Kill Bill, Mizuki is played by Chiaki Kuriyama. Yes, the lady who brought us Gogo, schoolgirl killer extraordinaire. She does an excellent job in portraying Mizuki as an angry and bitter teenager who falls for Adam’s mysterious gothic charm, and Eve as an ethereal being, patiently waiting for Adam to come for her, while unwilling to believe that she is someone like Mizuki.
Hiroki Narimiya does an excellent job as Tomoki, the mod style boyfriend who is a self-centered lazy ass, but is willing to reform in order to keep Mizuki. You rarely see character growth in live-action Japanese flicks, and it’s refreshing to see the one character that needed to change do exactly that. I was ready for Mizuki to ditch him for Adam at the beginning, but Tomoki eventually won me over. Tomoka Kurokawa plays her role well as Hotaru, who only wants Eve to find heaven, and then for Mizuki to return to her body and her own life. Motoki Ochiai lends support as Masaki Miura, her male friend who has connections and money, but who is otherwise nerdy.
The story is interesting as your standard “love beyond death” tale of supernatural drama, but it runs slow at some spaces as the characters catch up to what the audience already knows or guesses. Emotionally, it’s not a roller coaster, as Last Quarter keeps a melancholic tone throughout the story, as neither Mizuki, nor Sayaka Kamijo, nor Adam are people with happy lives. However, the ending is a happy one, surprising to see in Asian live-action cinema. (Seriously. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a happy ending until now.) I really liked the twist at the end where it is revealed that Tomoki did know Mizuki in her previous life as Sayaka; he was her twin brother. There’s a Japanese belief that twins are reincarnated lovers from a previous life who die a tragic death, so I liked the circle of karma, so to speak.
Visually, Last Quarter is gorgeous. It’s not shiny in the way that high-price Hollywood productions are, but for a Japanese live-action film, it’s nice and the colors are solid. The characters wear the distinctive clothing that you come to expect from Ai Yazawa’s hand, with Tomoki’s mod wear, Mizuki’s high-fashion, and Adam and Eve’s Labyrinth wardrobe. The director has made an effort to separate otherworldly experiences from reality, as well as using muted tones and filters in flashbacks of the events 19 years prior. The special effects are not cutting edge, but they do the job nicely and don’t detract much. Except for the cat with light blue “ghost flames.” That was a little too much, even for me. There is a fun segment in the film where Masaki explains the phases of the moon to Hotaru and Tomoki, set in the style of the sepia-toned “Journey to the Moon.”
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