Silent Love: From Japan, With Love

Director Eiji Uchida’s new romantic offering is founded on a terrific premise of unconditional love. The film begins with the blind Mika (the lovely Minami Hamabe) trying to jump off the roof of the piano music school where she was a star student until a road accident took her eyes away.Aoi (Ryosuke Yamada), a mute handyman at the music school stops her from jumping just in time. From then on, Aoi takes it upon himself to protect Mika from all danger. He trails her quietly on the road, diverting traffic, and commuters, removing all obstacles from her path, quite literally. Aoi is Mika’s knight in shining armour.ALSO READ: CONFIRMED! Coldplay Coming To India In 2025For Mika, Aoi is the “hand of God”. Sadly we don’t feel the divine intervention the film needs as it moves forward.The opening section of the film is incredibly beautiful in thought and execution. I could close my eyes and see a sightless Sai Pallavi being quietly protected by Kartik Aaryan in a Hindi remake. Sadly Silent Love slips up in its screenwriting and proves itself unworthy of any reinterpretation.What starts as an illuminating take on selfless love slips into the cracks. The storytelling gathers momentum by squandering all logic. In a triangular twist echoing the Sanjay Dutt-Madhuri Dixit-Salman triangle in Sajan, Mika hires a piano whizkid Kitamura (Shuhei Nomura) to pretend to be Aoi and teach Mika on the piano.While such romantic subterfuge went out of fashion in Indian cinema after Padosan, it seems to find a pride of place in Eiji Uchida’s cinema. The young Japanese director had scored big with his transgender drama Midnight Swan four years ago.ALSO READ: All We Imagine As Light: Payal Kapadia Film To Represent France At Oscars 2025What went wrong with Silent Love? Where are the silent moments of meditative bonding between the two damaged protagonists? In a flashback, we are shown how Aoi was a streetfighter who lost his voice in a bitter brawl.Sadly the film too loses its voice while battling with writing disabilities. The plot gets wobbly and contrived as it moves from one level of melodrama to another. To cite an example, the screenwriters plot to place Mika with the two men who love her in a guest house. The miss-understand, or shall we say, the kiss-understanding that ensues is so trite and clichéd, so Mills & Boon, it feels like a betrayal.The initial delicacy of the silent relationship is eventually drowned in a pool of artificial blood in the clunky climax which seems to have been written for another far less honourably intended potboiler.Silent Love shows so much promise initially. The bright morning merges into a gloomy evening, in this promising failure of a film.