Never give up!
A young woman with cerebral palsy lives with her mother and she dreams of writing her own manga. She seeks out a publishing house where she presents her latest work, and the woman who looks at her drawings asks if she is a virgin, which she is. The editor believes that she’s good and has talent, but that she must experience sex herself to become more credible when she creates a manga that focuses on sex. So now she embarks on a little adventure where she tries to have sex for the first time, but there’s also a lot of other things happening in her life.
37 Seconds is an adult movie about a young woman who has not been given the best cards in life when she was born. But she never gives up. And you get angry at her very overprotective mother. She becomes the antagonist in the movie, but she means nothing bad with the way she acts. It’s just that she’s got blindfolds on after all these years where she’s taken good care of her daughter which has now grown up. And her daughter wants to live a normal life for as long as possible.
This is a well-acted movie where you root for the protagonist and her journey. There are some surprises in her life that she didn’t know about, and that’s the weak point of the movie.
Mei Kayama is fantastic. It feels like she’s playing herself and what she has been through since she has cerebral palsy in reality. This is her first movie role, and I hope it won’t be the last time we see her acting. She’s so natural in this role.
You also get very annoyed with the person she works for. There’s a scene in the movie that hurts to watch, and you hope that the protagonist tells her that she’s not interested in working for this fake person.
The main focus of the movie is to give you the feeling of hope, and it succeeds with that. One should never give up, even if things can be difficult. As a viewer, you get annoyed with the mother. But everything has its reason. And if you have lived long enough, you understand the slightly simple explanation the movie gives you about things that happened in the past.