Synopsis
Yasuyuki is between jobs and has just received a break-up notice from his girlfriend. Tomorrow, he has to leave the house he’s been living in with her and go his own way. Yasuyuki, with no job and nowhere to go, finds a deserted dog. Sympathizing with the dog, which he feels is in the same sorry plight as himself, he goes to a dog-training center. The dog, called Tamura, becomes an important influence on Yasuyuki’s life. Yasuyuki and Tamura’s common bond is that they are both poor deserted creatures. While it’s true that Miwa, Yasuyuki’s girlfriend, wanted to break up with him partly because she was tired of their life together, the real reason is her complicated family affairs - like her mother’s sickness and her sister’s breach with her mother. Yasuyuki tries to embrace this situation but Miwa doesn’t accept his well-intentioned kindness. The communication failure raises emotional barriers between them. Tamura, Yasuyuki’s new best friend, functions as a medium, enabling them to get past these barriers. Yasuyuki’s genuine affections go out to Miwa through the dog, which results in the reconciliation of Miwa’s family. So the film is not an ordinary family drama on a friendship between manand animal, but rather a real drama trying to prove the possibility of restoring damaged human relationships loaded with misunderstandings with “genuine affections”. The dog is just the means. The blossoming of “genuine affections” goes hand in hand with the gradual process of Yasuyuki’s “training” Tamura. This movie attempts to assert the possibility of restoring stained human relationships to the “pure” state, through the example of the unconditional devotion of animals. (LIM Ji-soo)