Dead, but not forgotten.
Tomoyo hears on the news that her best friend has killed herself. She lived a hard life because of her abusive father. Tomoyo confronts the abusive father, and she steals the urn containing the remains of her deceased friend. She wants to scatter her friend’s ashes in a special place, and she takes the trip to a small coastal town. But not everything goes as planned on this trip.
My Broken Mariko is a short movie to be a Japanese movie, and it’s based on a manga. The runtime is just around 80 minutes before the end credits show up on the screen.
This is a small movie where we see what happened in the protagonist’s past, and on her journey, the protagonist meets a man, who is out fishing, and they form a special bond. But most of the time the protagonist visits the past when she and her deceased friend had conversations and experienced things together, which makes her emotional. So when she is upset, she yells a lot, and she also smokes and drinks. Is she about to lose control of herself? She can be loud, this woman!
The movie blends in some comedy, and it has a light tone that I guess many will not like since the abusive father abused his daughter in a way you don’t abuse a daughter. He hits her, breaks her arm, and does other nasty things, that I guess you can figure out yourself. I could accept the physical abuse since that is the point of the movie, but not the other nasty thing he did to her. It didn’t fit the tone and atmosphere of the movie.
My Broken Mariko isn’t a movie I would recommend you to watch if you don’t like comedy mixed with abuse towards an innocent girl and later a woman. The woman took her own life, and even though I didn’t hate the movie, I see how others can have a problem with the tone of the movie when we hear and see what the abusive father did to his daughter.