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Takashi Miike’s First Love Is A Delightfully Earnest Rom-Com Set To An Onslaught Of Slaughter
As you might anticipate, First Love is a story of boy meets girl, but coming from Takashi Miike, the visionary director behind Ichi the Killer, Audition, and 13 Assasins, you might rightly anticipate this romantic-comedy is less flowers and kisses and more yakuzas and blood. There is also a high-kicking revenge killer, a grimacing ghost in tightie-whities, and a pair of gruesome yet pretty damn funny decapitations.
Written by Masa Nakamura, First Love centers on a pair of unlikely lovers. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a stoic boxer who feels numb to his victories and losses, until he’s diagonosed with a deadly brain tumor. Monica (Sakurako Konishi) is a drug-addicted sex worker haunted by the ghost of her abusive father. But one day in the back alleys of Tokyo, they have a life-changing meet-cute when Leo punches out a corrupt cop. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…
While Leo is coming to grips with his deadly diagnosis, and Monica spends her days sprawled in a daze on the floor of her merciless pimp’s pad, a complicated drug heist is brewing. An arrogant yakuza (Shôta Sometani), whose ambitions outstretch his abilities, schemes to steal a stash of drugs kept at the aforementioned pimp’s place. So he calls in a…
