FANTASIA25 REVIEW: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 86 minutes
Director(s): Kenichi Ugana
Writer(s): Kenichi Ugana

I love you so much that I could kill you.

Shina (Ui Mihara) has grown apathetic towards the movie industry in Japan. Although she only pursued acting as a career because it was the one thing the world didn’t simply give her sight unseen, she’d learned to love it. That’s what happens when you put your all into something in order to succeed instead of just going through the motions because success was inevitable. So, suddenly feeling the latter about this hard-fought passion despite all that work places her at a crucial crossroads. Should she just keep going because it’s easy? Or should she head to America in hopes of finding new inspiration?

Jack (Estevan Muñoz) has conversely grown apathetic about the movie industry in New York City. He’d like to believe he isn’t the type of person who’d say he’d die without cinema, but … he’d die without cinema. So, he left Portland for the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of Crummy Productions (run by Larry Fessenden) and one day make a name for himself in lights. But, years later, he’s still just an assistant whose dream feels wholly out of reach. The only thing left to do is shoot his own film and hope putting the production on his shoulders will reignite that passion. Unfortunately, his lead actress just quit.

Kenichi Ugana’s fantastically titled I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn starts with the perfect set-up for kismet. Jack needs an actor willing to commit. Shina needs a director with the childlike innocence to make a project feel like fun rather than work. Not only are they from two completely different worlds geographically (they need his phone to translate until rapport and empathy makes it so they understand each other despite the language barrier), they’re from two different genres too. She wonders why Jack and his barebones crew keep laughing while making a horror film. He’s so oblivious to Shina’s fame that he tries to assuage her doubts by saying “acting is easy.”

You can guess how things progress from there. Not because Ugana’s script is obvious, but because his intent isn’t to shock. This is a cutely sentimental rom-com reminding its characters (and the audience) that life is too short to place wealth and fame above happiness. It’s too short to discover you only keep your boyfriend (Katsunari Nakagawa’s Ren) around as a commodity to bolster your image and not because you have any true love towards him. It’s too short to worry about one-star reviews or whether your film will make it into theaters when worrying is a luxury because it means you actually made something.

They both blindly leap into the abyss together due to Ugana intentionally having them not seek a better way to understand each other. Because not being able to talk and be heard also means not being able to talk yourself out of doing something. It becomes about trust and energy rather than appearance or reputation. The sheer joy Jack and company exudes for no other reason than filming a scene (regardless of its quality) becomes infectious for Shina. She’s excited to come to set because she has zero clue what might happen beyond the fact that it will be a good time. No money equals no pressure.

So, the world inevitably intervenes for some conflict beyond whether their lack of a permit might shut them down. Someone will recognize Shina and unwittingly bring the weight of celebrity and expectations back into her mind. Will she let them consume her again? Will the voice calling Jack a hack and everything she’s doing a waste of time subdue the reality that she’d rather goof around in blood with friends than go back home to sterile sets and uninspired junkets? Yes, there’s a blossoming romance and the desire to finish what she started, but the main theme here is that choosing the “safe” bet is often a recipe for boredom.

It’s an earnest message told earnestly. It must when you’re dealing with a juxtaposition between a consummate Japanese professional and an emotions-on-sleeve American manchild. Think too deeply and Jack becomes too annoying to bother with and Shina too talented to let herself be blackmailed into performing in an underground film. You become the exact person in desperate need of listening to what this movie preaches. Because making that central dynamic and their actions so big is purposeful. It’s about holding a mirror up to oneself to realize something must change and there’s a difference between exuberance and immaturity. We should all aspire to feel like children again.