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| Source: IMDb |
“I’m 46 and I’ve ended up becoming a pretty boring adult.”
Amongst many things, this ongoing pandemic has taught us how easily regrets and unfulfilled dreams can pile up. All of us often have times when we introspect and look back on the time of our life that has long passed. It's easy to get hit by a huge wave of nostalgia and regret as you recall all your dreams about your future self and how hardly any of them have actually come true.
Netflix’s ‘We Couldn't Become Adults’ brings to us a story that could very well belong to any of us. It's all about spiraling down the memory lane when an almost 50 man, kinda depressed and full of regrets, gets a friend request from a lover of the past that he could never forget.
Introduction
Movie’s Name - We Couldn’t Become Adults
Directed By - Yoshihiro Mori
Genre - Drama, Romance
Release Date - 5th November 2021
Run Time - 2 hrs 04 mins
Language - Japanese
Plot Synopsis
The movie begins with a scene of Tokyo’s deserted street with banners of ‘Olympics Tokyo 2020’ on the streetlamps. Sato, our almost 50 protagonists, is walking down the street with his friend Nanase after they’ve fatefully met after a long time, talking about life. In a drunken fit, Nanase drags Sato into a garbage pile with him.
While Sato tells him to get up, Nanase cries that “I've Got nothing. Nothing! You’ve all left me behind!”. Nanase having a fit about how life’s become nothing makes Sato think about how his own life didn’t turn out any different. He begins to reflect on his life.
As he walks through the alleyways of Tokyo where he has fond recollections of his youth, the different episodes of his life begin to flash before his eyes, all his broken dreams and regrets and he begins to wonder if this is all there is to life.
Movie Review
‘We Couldn’t Become Adults’ moves backward in time, from the present to 2015, then 2011, 2008, and then from 2000 to 1995 and then it stops because this was the year that was essentially the beginning of it all, the build-up of his hopes and dreams and their steady slip into the oblivion.
Sato is a man almost obsessed with not being ordinary which is probably because of being dumped by the love of his life when he proposed marriage because, in her view, it was just so ordinary. He’s always chanting it like a mantra and using “that’s so ordinary” to run away from his incapability of having neither the ordinary nor the extraordinary.
Almost everything that people did, Kaori, Sato’s first love, called each of the ordinary. Whether it was owning trendy clothes or marriage. She was such a big influence on Sato that even after she left him, her memories and her concept of “ordinary” never left Sato. When everybody around him was living in reality and doing the so-called ordinary things, Sato was always chasing the non-ordinary without even knowing what it really was.
Sato's average existence included memories of his love and time spent with her, his ordinary friends, talking and playing with them at the bar, his very ordinary workplace, girls he hooked up with, and a woman he married and then divorced. In the end, the things Sato regretted were more than the things he didn’t.
This movie is not for everyone, not everyone will get what the movie is about and what’s the point of it all. Having a very slow pace and a far deeper story, it speaks to a lot of the Gen-X going through every day, somehow just surviving in their dead-end jobs, always thinking about how they could’ve been in a better place if only they had more chances if they could redo a few things.
Highlights of the Movie
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The Bottom Line
‘We Couldn’t Become Adults’ is definitely far from being a romantic movie with lots of fluff. It's more of an existential film that makes you wonder about your own life, no matter what kind of life you’re living.
The slow pace makes you realize that life sure seems to go slowly which makes you think that there’s still time but before you know it, you’ve already lived most of it and those days can never come back. You’re just left drowning in the nostalgia of your faded youth that seemed to be vibrant and unpredictable. You recollect those days later in life, realizing how your life has changed yet somehow, it hasn’t.
IMDb ratings - 6.5 on 10
‘We Couldn’t Become Adults’ is currently streaming on Netflix.
Written By - Sanjana Chaudhary
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