Matsuko is always looking for her father's love but feels that he dedicates all his attention to Kumi, the ill daughter. As a result, she will spend the rest of her life looking for love in the wrong places. At the school where she works, she gets fired for trying to protect a student who stole money. She leaves her family and flees the city. For the next thirty years, Matsuko will do nothing but always choose what is worst for her. Humiliating jobs and countless abusive and vioent men who beat her and she forgives them.
The whole story is a melodrama that tries to make us feel sorry for Matsuko, but I couldn't. She's just too stupid. It's one thing to have problems of parental rejection, and another to make the same idiotic mistake two hundred times, even when fate offers her a second chance over and over again. Matsuko rejects good friends, rejects her sweet and loving sister and basically rejects everyone who can do her some good. This kind of corny storyline works well on daytime TV soap operas. In the film, it's a major flaw.
Kiraware Matsuko no isshô is excellent in terms of direction, casting and production. Very well-crafted storytelling. But fails miserably on the story itself, which is shallow and daft. Good example of it is the final scene, very cute and colorful, as well as dumb and empty, where Matsuko meets her sister in heaven and does what she could have done a dozen times while both were alive.
The whole story is a melodrama that tries to make us feel sorry for Matsuko, but I couldn't. She's just too stupid. It's one thing to have problems of parental rejection, and another to make the same idiotic mistake two hundred times, even when fate offers her a second chance over and over again. Matsuko rejects good friends, rejects her sweet and loving sister and basically rejects everyone who can do her some good. This kind of corny storyline works well on daytime TV soap operas. In the film, it's a major flaw.
Kiraware Matsuko no isshô is excellent in terms of direction, casting and production. Very well-crafted storytelling. But fails miserably on the story itself, which is shallow and daft. Good example of it is the final scene, very cute and colorful, as well as dumb and empty, where Matsuko meets her sister in heaven and does what she could have done a dozen times while both were alive.