Starring: Mao Inoue, Jonathan Sherr, Ryoko Kuninaka, Jun Kunimura Director: Kazuaki Ue Category: IIA (Japanese and English)
My Darling is a Foreigner seems like a grating cultural-clash comedy when it starts. But beyond its first reel - featuring a misunderstanding between the film's American protagonist Tony (Jonathan Sherr) and a passer-by, and his partner Saori (Mao Inoue, right with Sherr) putting up with a borderline-racist diatribe from Tony's friend - Kazuaki Ue's film finds a footing as a love story, with the leading characters' cultural differences fading into insignificance.
The film is an adaptation of Sayuri Oguri's manga series, which chronicles her married life in Tokyo with a Japan-loving, Japanese-speaking, American man. As the film begins, Saori is a budding manga writer seeking her first break and is preparing to go steady with Tony, a soft-speaking and generous man who knows and respects - sometimes even more than his young partner - all the nuances inherent in Japanese culture, ranging from linguistic connotations to social etiquette.
And it's around the latter that doubts begin to emerge when the pair finally becomes an item, as a wedding mishap (when Saori shuns Tony's suggestions of a formal meeting with her parents) leads to the young woman's father (Jun Kunimura) quietly expressing his disapproval of the pair's relationship.
The film veers away from using this as the main pivot and Ue allows more general and believably mundane conflicts to rear their heads instead. The film also plays with Tony's difficulties in acclimatising with Saori's life, but his (slightly comical) failings are relatively free of cultural connotations.
My Darling is a Foreigner actually defies its own appearance by morphing into a story which looks at universal themes about relationships involving lovers and relatives, especially during a time when more self-centred preoccupations - Saori's professional success, for example - come into play.