The rude woman.
A Japanese woman and her team travel to Uzbekistan to make a TV episode about this country. But she’s not happy with her life. Her big dream is to become a singer, and she has a man back home in Japan that she loves. He works as a firefighter, and she’s terrified of losing him. Most things that can go wrong, goes wrong for her on this trip. And now she experiences a whole new culture, and she hasn’t exactly done her homework.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the director, and he traveled to Uzbekistan to make the movie. I have watched another Kiyoshi Kurasawa movie from 2013 called The Seventh Code, where he visited a city in Russia. And he uses the same actor from that movie, Atsuko Maeda. I know little about her, but she’s very good in this movie. She’s so confused and fragile. I have to say I was impressed by her acting where she plays a confused woman who isn’t prepared at all when she’s in a foreign country.
The scene I find most interesting is when the protagonist is filming in an area she’s not allowed to film. It ends up that she’s being chased by several cops. She acts like a rude tourist who doesn’t care about how to behave in a foreign country. And she doesn’t bring a translation book to help her communicate with the locals. Kiyoshi Kurosawa takes up this topic in an interesting way. Be prepared, don’t behave like a brain-dead tourist who is rude and who thinks the entire world is just about yourself!
To the Ends of the Earth isn’t a movie that Kiyoshi Kurosawa usually makes. Although the movie is slow, it’s a relaxing experience. I liked that the protagonist gets a wake-up call during the trip as she is very self-absorbed. This will be a journey where she will open up her eyes and hopefully mature as a person. Because she lives in a little bubble, and that bubble is what the movie is trying to burst! And it succeeds!