The first time I watched a film, I spent the whole time taking screenshots.

I do not know who said it before, but beautiful girls tend to resemble their fathers more, while handsome boys tend to resemble their mothers more.

I had felt a little of androgynous beauty in Brigitte Lin before, but hers was ultimately classical; my aesthetic sense could not connect with it directly. But this female lead drove straight into my face.

“A short story that blends the worlds of fictional characters and real people.”

This refers to the female lead’s fan fiction. The interweaving of reality and fiction is a good idea.

The film’s overall setting is similar to Sayonara Wild Hearts. It has a little to say about feminism and being transgender. In the game, the female lead seems to lose her way and become a fake boy. At the reconciliation, she ends by sitting down and playing the guitar as a woman. It still does not quite escape the limits of gender. Although it is a good ending, after the author takes so many drugs along the way, they still do not cross that line. Perhaps that was also meant to accommodate a mainstream audience.

But the female lead in the film is exactly my favorite type: violent, distant, and unapproachable. At the end, she remains that way. That is not quite accurate; rather, once she discovers that she is a “boy,” the anger that had nowhere to go finally disappears.

Beyond that, there does not seem to be much more to discuss, because the plot itself is a little thin.

But Max is quite an interesting character. At first, he seemed a little annoying to me: endlessly talkative, always seeming to need attention from others.

He also constantly mocks the female lead’s clothes, intentionally or not, as if he wants her to change back to how she used to be.

But many details later changed my view of him. The first was at the gym, when he saw the female lead being abused online and became furious. Only then did I realize: oh, fuck, this person likes her. It is the kind of affection Shōya Ishida has in A Silent Voice. Unfortunately, the female lead is dense as wood—and very aggressive too.

Still, there was something powerful about the scene where he forcibly presses her back into her seat when she argues with a boy and gets hit. When he confronts the boy, I finally understood that the gym had been foreshadowing this moment.

And compared with the scene later where the male lead abandons her and runs away—he had spent three months in the hospital after being beaten by thugs, so he is terrified of such situations—it becomes another piece of foreshadowing.

I only feel that Max is a little like me, though I do not really want to admit it.

We all have flaws. Max does not know how to express himself, and the male lead is cowardly, even if there are reasons for it. But in the end, we only want to be with the person whose company feels most comfortable. The angry star and Cinderella are brought together by the words “Your nails are beautiful,” and the film ends with them together forever.

To be honest, the film is quite shallow. But I was completely absorbed in taking screenshots, so I did not mind much.

Here are a few more.