Two of Us

There is a small movie theater in Nakameguro. I found it when I went to the pension office. It had a funny name, "Kin-kero theater".
In the meantime, it so happened that my mother got two tickets of a movie for free from her elderly club. The movie was titled "Two of us (いつも二人)", directed and starred by Kinya Aikawa. She gave me the tickets. I was surprised to know that the movie was showing at the theater I just found the other day.
The movie did not seem too interesting, but I was just curious besides it was free. I went to see it with my wife.
The theater was very small. We went inside 2 minutes before the movie started. When I looked around I found that we seemed like the youngest couple. I remembered that the ticket had been delivered at a silver-age club.
The movie started. Middle aged man played by Kinya Aikawa suddenly appeared on the screen walking in a rural spa town, followed by a young heroine acted by Kanka-nin on the stage of a strip tease show. Yes, her role was a stripteaser. He is a kind of her manager. Somehow they escaped the spa town and opened a small pub where he works as chef. He has long been in love with her but he just can't tell her perhaps considering the age gap between them and she seems to think of him as her father. Instead he takes care of her all the time including making meals for her and her yakuza boyfriend who sleeps with her in her room.
As is well predicted, through her experience of hardship with those bad boyfriends, she finally realizes who she really has loved, and gets married with him. The old man's dream conveniently comes true. But soon after the happy marriage life appears to get started, he gets a stroke and dies. She feels sad but she decides to live her life running the pub keeping her good memory with him. She changes the pub's name from "Keiko(her name)" to "Two of us".
You may well think that what the point of this movie is. I agree. If there were, it would be that the movie showed how Kinya Aikawa lacks any talent required for a movie director as well as an actor, especially when he somehow found beauty in a secret love of an old man toward a young and pretty girl and tried to film the banal theme in an extremely cheap way. It may not be wrong that Kinya Aikawa personally holds such a convenient desire (or dream or illusion?) of an old man. But making into a film is quite another. It just doesn't worth it. This love might be bitter-sweet but no different from a B class adolescent love story.
The plot and story was almost laughable already. But there is more to it. All the actors and actresses (except Masato Akatuka), were amazingly hams. It was like seeing a terrible school play. In some serious scenes we could not help laughing at script-reading-like conversations. The cuteness of the heroine, a look-alike of 浅田真央, failed to save the movie because she herself is a school-play actress. There was no laughter from the audience when it was supposed to be funny, no tears when sad.
On our way home we talked to each other that it was worth coming all the way and seeing. We haven't seen such a cheap movie ever before in our lives and are likely never. In that sense it was a precious experience. After all we enjoyed it. But never twice.
Talking about the theater room, the acourstic effect was not well designed. It reverberated conversations in the movie so that we sometimes could not catch. The good side of the theater was the seat. It was comfortable and the leg room was spacious enough.
Two of us^^ thought we knew the reason why he built his private theater. No other theater is definitely willing to show it. But, having said that, I like Kinya Aikawa all the more for it because I guess he is kind of man who purely believes that what he likes should be liked by all. It must be one of the personable qualities of him.