Bandage Club

"Departure (おくりびと)" won the Oscar in the best foreign language film division. Japanese movies are really good these days.
I happened to watch a movie titled "Bandage Club(包帯クラブ)" on TV yesterday. You can say that it is what we call "adolescent movie" in which boys and girls grow mentally or "physically" through bitter-sweet experience in their friendship, love or death. But this is not just a boy-meets-girl story.
The movie is about a group of high-school teenagers who ties bandages around things and places on the requests through the Internet from unhappy strangers who get hurt by those things or at theose places. When they bandaged, they take its pictures and upload onto the website which turns out to heal the emotional wounds of those people who made the request.
The founder of the club is a girl named Wara who is just drifting from day to day without having much interest in her life. She meets a boy called Dino on the roof of a hospital when what he thinks is she is going to kill herself (actually not) by jumping off. He ties a bandage around one pole of the fence on which she was standing when he saw her, and tells her that now he cured the wound in her broken heart by doing so. DIno leaves, saying if Wara had not been there, it would have been he that jumped off the roof.
Wara feels cured somehow by this single strip of bandage tied to where she got once hurt. It is a matter of course that tying bandages does not do anything, but knowing someone really cares about you does help.
Thus the story develops centering around the idea that understanding other's pains through the act of bandaging is in fact an act of healing your own pain.
I basically enjoy 青春映画 even if it is full of cheesy ideas^^. I liked this film particularly better because this "Utopian" film was presented extraordinarily well.
One of the main characters Dino was played superbly well by a young actor Yuuya Yagira（柳楽優弥）. Satomi Ishihara was also good.