Utopians (2016)

If you like teacher/student stories and if you don't mind explicit (bi)sexual content, this is a good movie.

I liked it. It was not amazing but it was a nice watch. It could have been a deeper, more emotional story but on the other hand I guess it was meant to be just what it was. It was very dream-like, and not just the parts that were actual dreams. A young person's dream. Or someone with a young soul, doesn't matter… I liked some of the things they said even though it felt like the whole movie was just a sort of frame for those words… fair enough! The writer is obviously a big fan of Mishima Yukio but I kind of like the obviousness of that, too. The scene where the main character sees a place from a novel in real life was really cute.

Some parts of it were a little bit weird and almost too much (sort of like teaching a person to swim by throwing them into deep water before letting them practice at the shallow end of the pool) but I kind of understand that, too. The professor wanted to be honest and open about the way he thought and lived and that's not wrong.

As I was watching this I couldn't help thinking of the movie Koi. (J-drama special.) Teacher-student affair/menage à trois even though they are different (they were four here, for one thing *lol*). Koi had less sex scenes and less homoerotic content (but it was implied and until someone reads the novel and tells me otherwise I'm sure it was more like "text" and not subtext in that one!) but on the other hand it had more… well, plot, story. (Also, it had Arata as a hot English literature professor - forgive my bias!) But like I said, I think the writer or Utopia had a different aim. The makers of the movie wanted people who watched it change their way of thinking in a certain direction… which is something I sympathize with.

I also liked that the only really sad part of this was the ways of the society they lived it; the overall mood of the story was happy and accepting and in the end sort of sweet. Some people may find it bizarre but I kind of liked it!

The acting was good but nothing extraordinary I guess. I found the characters believable. I've already forgotten the music. I don't rewatch, I never know what to say about it...

Read More