I had the opportunity to see this at Nippon Connection Festival in Frankfurt/Germany and was quite surprised cause it has been a long time since I've seen a Japanese movie without Yakuza, sex, violence, slapstick or tarantinoesk gang-shootout. This one takes some time to get fully into gear, but after 20 Minutes the audience gets the connection to the four main characters which are teenagers in a town not far from Tokyo.

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The beginning and end of Love on Sunday is nearly perfect. The director has a real talent for creating realistic teenage relationships in a world suffused with catchy Japanese pop rock music. Yet the middle chunk of the movie, while compelling, is an uncomfortable blend of realism and melodrama.

The story is simple enough. Teenage Akira is about to move to Tokyo but before she goes she wants confess her love to best friend Nao. He is not only oblivious but is in love with popular girl Tamaki, who is still in love with ex-boyfriend Gaku, who is in turn in love with Akira. There are multiple twists and turns as each of the boys and girls compete for the affections of their crush. The melodramatic tendencies of this kind of story is tempered somewhat by the uniformly excellent performances of the young actors who make the cliché romantic dialog and somewhat unrealistic situations mostly believable. The use of rock music, and in some shots music video closeups though, belies the more realist aesthetic of the movie with its silent long shots. I left it slightly confused as to whether this was a mass-market film with an indie sensibility or an indie film with mass-market aspirations.

The youthful energy of the film though is obvious. The actors look like they are the same age as the characters they are portraying. They have good chemistry and create a love quadrangle that is likely to make the film compelling to watch, regardless of its flaws.