Despite taking place in the glittery, plasticized universe of Japanese girlband stardom, a strange drabness pervades director Koji Fukada‘s “Love on Trial,” a downtempo price-of-fame drama that consistently takes the least interesting route out of the fraught situations it sets up. Where there’s the potential for incisive commentary on the chew-em-up, spit-em-out nature of modern celebrity, Fukada’s oblique approach has all the rhythm of a popsong’s intro stuck on a never-ending loop: all filler instrumental, no catchy hook.
Happyfanfare is a hard-working five-girl outfit, who have been together for four years. They have risen to the top of the middle, and are eagerly eyeing their promotion to the bottom of the top. The establishing scenes of “Love on Trial” do a decent job of instantly de-mythologizing this milieu of artifice and shiny surfaces, as we watch the band hustled onto a small stage to perform their synchronized choreography for a mid-sized crowd almost exclusively composed of adult men. This is part gig, part fan convention, part meat market, all PR opportunity.
Afterwards the girls do a meet-and-greet so fans can get a little one-on-one time with their favorite bandmember. Their management — represented by handler Saya (Karata Erika) an ex-idol herself and her distant, perma-sunglassed boss (Kenjiro Tsuda) — are monitoring the girls’ popularity not only as a unit but individually, pitting them against each other with the prospect of more prominent placement dangled as the prize. The thing with being a fivesome: someone’s always got to be in the middle.
At the moment, the focus is on Mai (Kyoko Saito, bringing her time as a member of J-pop girlband Hinatazaka46 to bear). But Nanaka (Yuna Nakamura) is closing in, as evidenced by one creepy obsessive who claims to have bought 50 copies of their last single just to ensure he gets to the front of her line. In response to her growing profile — which all the girls supplement with heavily sanitized OnlyFans-style webcam work — she’s given the lead on their next track (which sounds exactly like the last one). But then footage leaks of Nanaka canoodling with her boyfriend, a livestream gamer with his own sizeable following. Perversely, for such obviously sexualized youth-culture icons, the bandmembers are strictly banned from dating, the better to maintain the image of wholesome purity that is part of the paradoxical allure of these coquettish yet infantalized fantasy dreamgirls. Shattering that fantasy can be dangerous, as is proven when Nanaka’s superfan shows up disgruntled at their next event, this time wielding smoke bombs and a knife.
For such high drama, the stalker attack is shot by “Drive my Car” DP Hidetoshi Shinomiya and cut by editor Sylvie Lager much like the rest of the film, with a minimum of fuss or tension-building dynamism that borders on the bland. Really the incident is mostly a means to push Mai into the arms of her own illicit crush. She and former classmate Kei (Yuki Kura) reconnect after she spots him busking his street-magic/mime act one evening. But Mai keeps things platonic even though, as suggested by a few surreal flourishes, their attraction is strong enough to make his illusions actually defy physics. That changes the night of the attack, however, when a concerned Kei pulls up in his van and Mai clambers in, abandoning her fanbase, her bandmates and her management, for love.
So here’s a chance, at roughly the halfway point, to swerve into good old-fashioned romance. Instead Fukada, co-writing with Shintaro Mitani, skips ahead eight months to when management is suing Mai (and Kei, oddly) for breach of the Happyfanfare contract’s draconian morals clause. The rest of the film largely unfolds in sterile, windowless courtrooms as the terms of the clearly unethical (if apparently standard) agreement are reexamined, and the pressures of the trial strain the young couple’s relationship.
However before she even met Kei, Mai was ambivalent about the idol lifestyle, so her departure, while abrupt, is not so unexpected. And more crucially, in focusing on the sexist unfairness of this one aspect of the girlband industrial complex, Fukada somewhat gives the rest of the massive, grinding machinery of celebrity manufacture and consumption a pass. Despite its wild tonal swings, Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux,” for example, bristled with scathing ideas about toxic fandom; even Parker Finn’s “Smile 2” had plenty to say about the pop world’s health-hazard hypocrisies. Here it’s as though Fukada cannot get enough distance from the J-pop phenomenon to see its strangeness or condemn its cruelty except in one small area, via one small gesture of defiance, which will barely ding the cycle of exploitation, when for every girl who escapes or is discarded another 50 dewy ingenues are waiting to take her place — smiling, winking, waving with both hands.
