‘My Eyes’: A Lamentable Tear-Jerker

In a cemetery on a hill overlooking Kobe, Japan, family and friends have gathered to mark the second anniversary of the death of a young man, regarded by one and all as a paragon. Among the mourners is his former fiancee Hiroko (Miho Nakayama), who has not recovered from his death in a mountain-climbing accident; she still feels compelled to write to him at the address in Otaru, the small town in northern Japan in which he lived through his junior high years.

The impulse of Nakayama’s grieving Hiroko is understandable, but the film it sets in motion, Shunji Iwai’s “When I Close My Eyes,” is relentlessly tedious and contrived. Hiroko is of course astounded to receive a reply. It seems that throughout grade school and junior high, Hiroko’s dead lover shared the same name with a classmate, a girl named Itsuki Fujii (also played by Nakayama), who is the recipient of Hiroko’s letter. An epistolary friendship results, triggering lengthy flashbacks to the two Itsukis’ entirely unexceptional childhood.

All of this is part of Hiroko’s healing process, yet we’d really like to see more of her with her new fiance Akiba (Etsushi Toyokawa), an uninhibited yet sensitive glassblower, an artist of quirky personality but a man of infinite sensitivity and patience in regard to Hiroko. As her late fiance’s best friend--he was with him when he died on the mountain--Akiba realizes all too well that she needs to come to terms with her past so that she can get on with her life with him.

Coping with loss is a perennially viable and major theme, but here it’s treated with unrelenting and manipulative tear-jerking in one of the Japanese cinema’s least endearing traditions. The film furthermore is overlaid with an insistent hearts and flowers score that may drive you up the wall if it doesn’t drive you up the aisle and out of the theater first. That “When I Close My Eyes” gets a U.S. release when almost no Japanese films, including Akira Kurosawa’s most recent picture, reach our screens is all the more depressing.

* MPAA rating: PG, for brief mild language. Times guidelines: The film is suitable for general audiences.

‘When I Close My Eyes’

Miho Nakayama: Hiroko/Itsuki

Etsushi Toyokawa: Shigeru Akiba

Bunjaku Han: Itsuki’s mother

Katsuyuki Shinohara: Itsuki’s grandfather

A Fine Line Features presentation. Writer-director Shunji Iwai. Producers Koichi Murakami, Hajime Shigemura, Juichi Horiguchi, Jiro Komaki, Tomoki Ikeda, Masahiko Nagasawa. Executive producers Chiaki Matsushita, Shuji Abe. Cinematographer Noboru Shinoda. Costumes Chikae Takahashi. Music producer REMEDIOS. Production designer Terumi Hosoishi. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica. 1332 2nd St., (310) 394-9741