Your Name.

This was just as good as I remember! I haven’t seen this movie since pretty close to the time it came out, but at the time I thought it was one of the most special films I’d ever seen. I watched it quite a few times back then but it had been so long since the last time I’d watched it that recently I’d become a little worried that it wouldn’t be as good as I remembered. The way some people talk about this film It seemed potentially like one of those movies that you would fall in love with in high school only to return to as an adult and be disappointed by. But I was completely wrong, because this movie is still every bit as great now as it was then.  The body swapping trope is obviously nothing new, but I can’t think of a film which does it in as moving a way as this film. The romance combined with all the spiritual, time bending elements, it felt transcendent. There was one scene in particular which felt like it was just merging all these wild, explosive, existential concepts together in such an harmonious and beautiful way, I was actually in awe of how well it was all still working for me despite balancing so many different ideas at once. The spiritual, the subconscious, dreams, love, time, it’s actually insane how all these ideas are weaved together so seamlessly and with so much emotional weight. This is very much an emotion over logic kind of film, which I love. It’s clearly only using narrative as a vehicle to express more universal feelings and emotions. Sometimes the specifics of how certain fantasy or sci-fi element in the story work are left a little vague, but it was never to a point where I felt like it lost itself or couldn’t be explained, it just wasn’t as concerned with those technical elements as it was with the emotions that they were in service of. Narratively it reminded me quite a bit of Interstellar, but where I think that film stumbles in balancing it’s sci-fi and emotional elements, I think this film absolutely hits it out of the park. While watching it this time around there was even a moment where I thought to myself “this must be what Interstellar is like for the people who really love that movie.” Because it was just perfectly hitting all the marks in how it balanced its strange time related sci-fi, narrative conceit with its grand emotion and spectacle.  I’ve heard a lot of people criticize this movie for some supposed “illogical” narrative elements, particularly the characters never realizing that they’re living in different years, and I just don’t agree, but I also dint really care. First of all, the film made it very clear that when the characters were inside each other’s bodies, it’s a very hazy and dreamlike experience, and when they wake up in their real bodies, the memory of their experience in the others body isn’t clear at all.  I one real issue with the film is with the pacing. Early on the film kind of speeds through the initial body switching stuff at a pretty fast pace, it almost feels like one giant montage in a way (There’s a lot of montages in this film) and I wouldn’t have minded a bit more time dedicated to those scenes. But as the film went on, it became far less of an issue and I basically forgot about it by the third act.  Anyway. This movie is every bit as good as I remember and I’m really glad I re-watched it! I’m putting it in my favorites list.