By William Kustiono
On July 13th 2013, Japan Society presented It’s Me It’s Me (Ore-Ore) at Japan Cuts, The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema. Ore-Ore starred the Japanese pop star Kazuya Kamenashi from KATU-TUN, a Japanese boyband. This thriller film is directed by Satoshi Miki and based on the Japanese novel Ore Ore by Tomoyuki Hoshino. In 2011, Hoshino won the Kenzaburo Oe Prize (Japanese literacy award sponsored by Kodansha) for his novel, Ore Ore. This novel explains about the meaning of identity in the current period. The novel narrates a person who is engaged in a scam known as Ore ore sagi “me me scam”. The scam targets the elderly. The swindler pretends to be a family member or relative and have their victims sent them money over the phone.
The story is set in the present day; Hitoshi Nagano (Kamenashi Kazuya) is a failed photographer who currently works as an electronic-store clerk. One day, he finds a cellphone left by a detestable fellow customer named Daiki (Kamenashi Kazuya) at a fast food joint. He makes the decision to swindle Daiki’s mother. He dials the number, poses as her son, and persuades her to transfer 900,000 yen to his bank account.
What comes around goes around. Suddenly someone is posing as “Hitoshi” and successfully convincing his mother that it’s her son! Things start to get interesting. When Hitoshi finally confronts the imposter, he did not expect it to be Daiki, and to make things worse, Daiki turns out to be Hitoshi’s doppelganger. Left confused, Hitoshi slowly realize that everybody around him is becoming like him.
There are several notable supporting characters in this movie such as Hitoshi’s mysterious customer, Sayaka (Yuki Uchida), Hitoshi’s boss, Tajima (Ryo Kase), Minami-san (Eri Fuse), Hitoshi’s fellow worker Yasokichi (Ryu Nakatani), and Anzai (Kinako Kobayashi). As the story progresses, the real Hitoshi finds himself adapting to the new reality and introspect himself when meeting the other Hitoshis.
In this movie, Kazuya Kamenashi is play more than 20 different characters such as a career woman, high school student, police officer, office worker, and students. Ore-Ore is his fourth movie and in the 15th Udine Far East Film Festival in Italy, Kamenashi won the “My Movie Audience” Award for Ore-Ore. Overall, the movie offers the audience comedic moments to lighten the intensity, despite this film being categorized as a thriller. This movie also features KAT-TUN’s latest single, Face to Face, as the theme song of Ore-Ore.
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