This review may contain spoilers
'If you could freeze time and you weren't dying, what would you do?'
This was a very subtle, yet, in my opinion, a most important central piece for this movie.
The story of the movie isn't innovative in any way, it has a predictable central plot, but it brings some unique surprises while it reaches its ending.
I wouldn't have loved it so much if the story didn't twist so interestingly towards the last half an hour. I would have just thought that the movie was nice, but yet another typical, self-sacrificing love from one of the leads towards the other's happiness. And if it were so, then Sweet November would have been the more plausible story for me... but it turned out that the story was beyond that and it made me give this movie a special place in my heart.
Now, what really made this movie such a big hit for me were the actors... I mean, oh my God, the acting was among the best I've experienced, I was absolutely sucked in and I absolutely lived their pain, love and happiness alongside the two. Seldom do I fall in love with both male and female leads in a movie, so allow me to be excited :).
Time to go deeper into the movie!
I have to say that I really enjoyed how the story had, along the line of the plot, scattered interesting visual images that would fixate into my mind and give new meaning to the movie:
The numbers that would suddenly appear before his eyes every time he would waver as to giving up his love, to further enforce that time was running out for him were very interesting, especially when his career goes on the line for him excessively playing Cat Girl's song and his boss threatening his job, the shirt with 88 written on it suddenly popped before his eyes in order to assure him he was doing the right thing.
Also, when she returns from her date a little drunk and she sneaks in his bed, he feels really comfortable, but he gets up an leaves her after he sees 20x on the little pin-board next to his bed, reminding him of his days left.
Another nice image was that of him letting time pass again in the photo studio, when he decides to start on of the clocks, that is the moment when he knows time cannot stop and his love won't find fulfillment.
The cactus he chose as a gift for her is quite unique in its symbolism also: that species of gymnocalicium is a hybrid cactus, the colored top has no chlorophyll, so it needs to be put on top of another cactus, a green one, in order to get food and survive. That is, for me, the nature of their relationship, a symbioses, where one cannot survive without the other, neither can it let any ham come to the other, as the pain would be felt by them both.
Shall I answer the question from the beginning of my review? It's not a spoiler per say, but it will reveal, if you think hard about it, the ending of the movie, so I'd advise you to stop reading, if you don't want to get a glimpse of how the story id finished.
*** When time freezes, they could reveal the storm of feelings that boils in their hearts... Only when time freezes and everyone around them stops, will they be free to love one another, just like to birds flying towards the sky ***
Hope you enjoyed my review, have a great time watching the movie !
P.S.: Did anyone else got creeped out by the doctor after you saw in the ending he was a bit of a stalker?
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