Milocrorze - A Love Story

What the hell? Milocrorze is a decidedly bizarre Japanese anthology offering three weird, vaguely connected stories about ‘tragic’ love. Stylistically it’s wild and interesting and content-wise it’s full of strangeness, for both good and bad. It’s also rather vapid and shallow underneath all its style, with segments that lack any real meat, but it doesn't really matter. Like many anthology flicks, Milocrorze is an uneven movie as a whole. There’s a great segment, a good segment and a bad segment that bookends the film and brings the whole thing down. What’s weird is that the three segments are, as far as I can tell, directed by the same person and star the same main actor.

Anthology films are a weird concept, as I’ve discussed in the past. Sometimes they can give you something great (like Safe Haven from V/H/S 2) and other times you get garbage (ABCs of Death sucks). Anthology flicks also tend to mostly focus on horror (all the ones I can remember are horror-focused). So Milocrorze is a strange change for me in that regard. The easiest way to do this review is to go through each segment.

The first segment is split into two parts, the first at the very beginning of the film and the second at the end. It bookends the film, opening and closing it. It’s also the worst segment by far, starting things poorly and ending them weakly. Ovreneli, a weird young man with bright orange hair (played by a child), falls in love with a woman named Milocrorze. She’s described as the most perfect, beautiful woman in the world, but honestly she’s kinda plain and has no defining or positive characteristics. They have a house together and are happy, until she suddenly gets bored and starts dating other people. The young man gets sad, his heart falls out and he uses a frying pan to cover the hole in his chest. He lives the rest of his life sad. The end (of part one).

The second segment is the best and possibly the weirdest – Besson Kumagai, a ‘youth counsellor’ who runs a call advice number, gives desperate, nervous young men relationship advice. The advice is always something ridiculous and terrible (like constantly buying condoms at the supermarket so checkout chicks think you’re a stud). Every time he gives somebody advice, Besson suddenly breaks out into party dancing (with his own theme music), joined by a scantily clad lady entourage. He’s just funny. He has a bowl haircut, wears big shades, has a paunch, an ugly white suit and an oversized bowtie. He insults a lot of people, gives a few of them bad advice and dances a lot before the segment crashes (literally) into the next one.

 

The third is the longest segment by far (longer than the other two combined), and almost feels like it’s from another movie entirely. Tamon, a nice young man, falls in love with Yuri, a flower girl. He starts the romance slowly, and has to contend with her giant brutish boyfriend. He beats up the boyfriend and they’re happy for a while…until a gang of crossbow-wielding human traffickers attack, shooting out one of Tamon’s eyes and kidnapping Yuri. Tamon goes to find her, becoming a wandering samurai in the process, and tracks her down to a massive brothel/gambling den, which he then hacks his way through to find his love. The battle, Tamon versus a seemingly endless horde of goons, is stylistically cool but it goes on for ages because it’s shot in slowest-of-the-slow motion. You can fast forward through it and it’ll still look and feel really slow.

The ending brings us back to the first segment, some thirty years later. Ovreneli (now played by an adult) has lived a mostly sad life, and goes to a hot spring resort to cheer himself up. When he gets there he finds it’s run by Milocrorze and her new husband, a man twenty years her senior. Ovreneli pines for her, confronts the husband, gets punched out and leaves. When he goes home he’s finally over Milocrorze, his heart grows back and he lives the rest of his life happily. The end (of the movie).

 

So how does it all stack up? Oddly. It’s highly bizarre and strange, even for an anthology film. Its visuals and content feel more suited to music videos than a feature film, but there’s something inherently watchable about it, even if it is just the visual strangeness. This is a movie you could just have playing on mute in the background of a party.

The opening and ending ‘Milocrorze’ segments suck badly. I really didn’t like the style or story for either. While the vibrant colours are eye catching, the content is vapid and empty. They’re full of nonsense, as if stupid names and weirdness make up for a lack of anything good or clever. There’s no meat or humour there. Thankfully they’re both pretty short, but the opening sucks and the end segment (which is somehow worse) weakly limps the film to its credits.

The Tamon segment starts oddly (it initially feels a bit like a re-tread of the Milocrorze opening, including the initial high-colour style and seemingly even the story), and then gets weirdly interesting once it hits the wandering Samurai segment. The style and tone go darker and better and it looks really cool. Sadly it also wears out its welcome with its painstakingly long action sequence finale. This segment is also the only one to really feel like a proper short movie, with an actual plot and structure.

The Besson part is really funny, mostly because of the oddness of it. The random bursting into party dancing, the horrible relationship advice (complete with dramatizations) and just the character Besson are great. It does feel more like an extended sketch from a comedy show than anything else, but it’s good, weird fun nonetheless. 

In the end, like with any anthology film, it has its ups and downs. It’s sad that the downs bookend Milocrorze, which is otherwise a pretty strange, stylistic but bizarrely watchable anthology.