drowning love – N.K. International

Drowning Love aka Oboreru Knife (溺れるナイフ) was the second feature film of young female director Yamato Yuki. The movie hit Japanese theaters on November 5 in 2016 and over the years it has become a favourite amongst Komatsu Nana and Suda Masaki fans, partly because of its inner qualities (cinematography, plot, soundtrack) but also because of the growing popularity of its two leads.

Komatsu and Suda were co-stars again (first collaboration was for Destruction Babies) and Yamato‘s film gave them the proper environment to display remarkable onscreen chemistry. After that the two thespians met again in different projects like short films for Niko and and the 2020 hit that was Tapestry/Ito. What first united them on an artistic level reached another dimension when the two young stars announced their marriage in November 2021.

Interviews, stage greetings, premiere and special screenings, Komatsu Nana and Masaki Suda were pretty busy promoting the film back in Autumn 2016, here is a non exhaustive selection and compilation of pics (some HQ at the bottom of this post)

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Plot from AsianWiki: “Natsume Mochizuki (Nana Komatsu) works as a teen model in Tokyo, but she learns that she has to move to her father’s hometown of Ukigumo. She is in a desperate situation because she can’t do the things she wants to do in Ukigumo. One day, she meets Koichiro Hasegawa (Masaki Suda). He is the successor of the Hasegawa family. His family is wealthy and is respected in the area. Natsume Mochizuki and Koichiro Hasegawa become attracted to each other, but something changes their fate”.

Review Excerpt: “Drowning love is, besides being a rather unconventional love narrative, a demonstration of Yamato Yuki’s cinematographical talent. By framing the ever beautiful Nana Komatsu in concatenations of inventive compositions, Yuki Yamato succeeds in showing how cinematography as such can be used to communicate subjectivity in a romantic narrative. By evoking her subjectivity in a way that allows the spectator to feel like she feels, Yamato has created, despite the obvious romanticism, a sincere and believable account of Natsume’s first love”. Read the full review from Psycho Cinematography.