Name: 14-sai
Genre: Drama
Released: 2007-01-28
Duration: 1 h 54 min
Rating: 5.8
Cast: Kaori Fujii, Hiromasa Hirosue, Teruyuki Kagawa

"Fourteen" is a very disturbing film. It is about children in their early teens, and their attitudes towards life and adults around them. The pace of the whole film is set from the very first frame. The scene moves along very, very slowly as a teacher is asking a young girl student why she burned the house for the school pets. In the next scene, the girl chases after and stabs the teacher in the back with pencils! From there, you simply know that this is no ordinary film.

The film then follows this disturbed young girl Ryo 10 years later when she herself becomes a junior high teacher. Her approach is non-authoritative, unlike the others. Yet, she too is finding difficulty connecting with her students. She meets up with an old classmate who is now having problems connecting with his piano student. Ghosts of bullied pasts disturb them to the present day in their strained relationships with their students. You'll be scared to see your kids this way. You'll be scared for your kids to have teachers like these.

This is a very unusual Japanese film. The strong message is there for the adults, but the delivery style of the director is so painfully slo-o-o-o-ow. There are scenes that stay on for endless minutes without anything happening. There are inexplicable scenes of violence among students that are so random with no coherence to the other scenes. 

This is most definitely not for everybody. I do give it the stars for the message it is attempting to put across and for certain scenes which effectively do this. But overall, I did not like it because of its interminably glacial progression and frustratingly incoherent composition.

Japanese cinema is celebrated for its refined minimalist dramas and avant-garde experimentation; it also introduced popular genres like jidaigeki (samurai epics), kaiju, and anime. Across both high art and mass entertainment, it often explores morality, impermanence, and the pressures of modern life.

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The drama genre is a broad category that features stories portraying human experiences, emotions, conflicts, and relationships in a realistic and emotionally impactful way. Dramas delve into the complexities of human life, often exploring themes of love, loss, morality, societal issues, personal growth, with the aim to evoke an emotional response from the audience by presenting relatable and thought-provoking stories.

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Sensitive and refined drama in which experiences from the puberty of a female teacher and a piano student reflected in the world of the younger generation they have contact with. Ryo is a young teacher who, unlike her colleagues, does not adopt an authoritarian attitude to the adolescents she has in her care. She does not realise at first that, by doing this, she is putting herself at risk. The 14-year-olds feel misunderstood by the adults who insensitively snuff out their young ambitions. When their frustration grows, the adolescents turn into secretive and hard-bitten kids. As a result, Ryo is thrown back in time and confronted with her own dark past, in which she resisted the insensitive world of her superiors. Then she meets Koichi, a man she knows from her studies. He was a talented pianist in his youth, but his ambitions were also made impotence by an adult. Now he works for the local electricity company and he has allowed himself to be persuaded to give piano lessons to the son of a colleague. It becomes clear that Ryo and Koichi have shared experiences that they can only now relive and then come to terms with. Fourteen is an atmospheric and subtle drama in which two different generations mirror each other in the most vulnerable period of their lives

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14-sai

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