Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen

The inferno turned upside down. It ultimately rages outside the boundaries of her first love's inner being and accuses her surroundings - her era. This is because in the context of the director's work (and the film itself), it is evident that the documentary retrospective of the personal history of the characters serves not only as a mere dramatic construction of characters outside of space and time, but on the contrary, it attaches them to their social conditions: the increasingly frequent structures of perversion on the part of adult male characters, the disintegration of the traditional family, and women's emancipation form faithful backdrops for the psychology of the main characters, which also adorn the habitat of every modern film viewer. Moreover, what was common in this (and the best) period of world cinema - the story, psychology, and general statements - are combined with formal equilibristics, whose visual style may be self-serving in some places, but not unimpressive. In any case, the film deliberately does not achieve the status of a truly experimental film. The first love of the (post)modern era will have to overcome internal and external obstacles (forever?), but will never again encounter innocence, violated already in childhood and violated by perversion, and passed from victim to victim like from generation to generation. (31.03.2016)