Fridae

Thanks to the cellphone, reading is in. Or maybe it’s just the Japanese, who actually think that reading serialised novels on their cellphones is the most natural thing to do. Who would’ve known? Apparently, good stuff has been written for this unlikeliest of media, and My Rainy Days is a great film adaptation of the cellphone novel Tenshi no Koi, immensely popular among teenage girls and young working women demographic.

It’s a great choice for an adaptation, due to the curious blend of genres that the story traverses. The first half hour of My Rainy Days sets up the story of beautiful but manipulative Rio (Nozomi Sasaki), a high school student who cheerfully partakes of the country’s infamous compensated dating industry, and leads a ring that recruits her schoolmates into the vice. The rest of the movie takes a more traditional turn when Rio falls for a shy and retiring history professor, whose fatal illness will make for much melodrama and fuel her ultimate redemption.

But that’s not the reason why My Rainy Days is great. Despite what it seems, it’s more of a Trainspotting for girls than a sappy or moralistic romance. The girls do seem to have an awful lot of fun being bad (more fun than perhaps being good), so much so that one suspects the film and novel celebrate compensated dating as emancipatory. After all, it builds character and personality, is a means to financial independence, and forges strong friendships – even healthy homosexual relationships.

But what about heterosexual romance? It’s as sweet and non-physical as it can get. Rio’s male love interest so chaste he’s possibly neutered, and feels like a male version of the “blank canvass” romantic prospect typical of dating sims. (I’ll have to admit I thought the movie did play like one of the dating sim games I have in my collection.)

In other words, this movie is really about the joys of being female, being liberated, and having great relationships with girlfriends. That it clothes itself in a sappy romantic wrapper makes it even more fun and subversive to watch.