Kenichi Ugana is slowly making a name of himself – some would even go as far to call him a rising cult filmmaker. While his Goodbye Silence (2018) can only be viewed as a failed experiment, he subsequently proved his talent with Extraneous Matter – Complete edition (2020), Love Will Tear Us Apart (2023) and The Gesuidouz (2024).

Kenichi Ugana’s latest, his creative take on the romantic comedy genre, can be added to the list of films that corroborate that he knows how to create unique narratives and entertaining experiences. I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director In Brooklyn starts off by contrasting the subjective positions of Shina Mizuhara (Ui Mihara), a popular Japanese actress, and Jack (Estevan Munoz), a passionate rookie director.

Shina Mizuhara once had a passion for acting, yet it faded away with her rising popularity. Her busy schedule imprisoned her in a state of forced automatism, effacing her subjectivity and short-circuiting her ability to desire. To resuscitate her desire, she quits the agency and decides to travel to New-York with her boyfriend Ren (Katsunari Nakagawa).   

Her presence within the societal field is marked by the ‘malfunctioning’ of her ego as the bored and depressed state of her subject oozes out of the cracks of the image she wants to present to the other. This state of emptiness – a lack of passion and the absence of libidinal investments in the Other – seduces her to invest in vain fragments of the body-image (e.g. her nails, the perfect picture) and attack the other (e.g. the interviewer) to expose his/her hypocrisy. The latter act aims to reveal the disacknowledged emptiness of the Other and to confront him with the abyss of no-desire that lies behind the image of positivity.

Shina also spouts this kind of verbal violence while walking through New York with her boyfriend Ren. Yet, these complaints are not attacks on Ren, but on what envelops both him and her: the Other. Shina’s over-reliance on the image, the beautification of her ego, her defence against her aching lack of desire, goes hand in hand with the commodification of relationships and reducing others to mere accessories – For Shina, Ren is like a designer bag, it looks good on her.

Jack, on the other hand, is in many ways the opposite of Mizuhara. While he is struggling to realize his dream of becoming a director, he refuses to give up his love for the art of filmmaking. Or, to put it differently, the flame of his desire cannot be doused by all the disappointments and obstacles that came and are coming his way.

One night, both meet in the most unusual circumstances. A drunken Ren wanders around and slips, hitting the pavement. Jack, who got drunk at the same bar and is desperately searching for a new actress to star in his low-budget-film, is mesmerized by the crawling and crying Ren and promptly asks her to star in his film.    

I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director In Brooklin touches upon cultural differences, subtle prejudices, subjective differences, and the disorienting effect of being in a place that does not understand your tongue. For Shina, the inability to interact with others – she lacks basic English-speaking skills, forces her to be all-alone with her ego. The establishment of an interaction between her and the barman of the Lucky 13 Saloon signals the importance of the imaginary dimension – we fill in what the other supposedly desires based on our own thoughts and constructions – and underlines that misconception structures our interactions in a fundamental way.

Luckily, by using translation technology, Jack allows Ren to re-establish speech-interactions and latch herself onto another subject. Such technology, moreover, re-affirms the necessary yet fictitious belief in being able to understand the other as subject. It is, moreover, quite telling that Shina, once she has accepted to star in Jack’s first picture, automatically falls back into the protective deceit of over-investing in her body-image (e.g. make-up, …).

Yet, such over-investment is out-of-place within the Z-Grade movie scene. Ugana, by framing how Shina’s idea of film-making is upset by the way low-budget underground movies are made, introduces the spectator to the exciting absurdity and passionate enthusiasm of being creative within severe limited means. Shina is, however, not only brutely confronted with passion – the passion for film and crafting your own filmic narratives, but with how such enthusiasm fuels relational bonds, with what has been lacking in her ‘superficial’ relationships with other.  

 

The composition of I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director In Brooklyn is quite straightforward, relying mainly on a concatenation of static shots to tell the tale of Shina and Ren. By relying on static long takes, Ugana confronts the spectator with Shina’s depressed violence towards the Other, her defensive measures against her subjective emptiness, in a sensible and rather intimate way and enables Jack’s enthusiasm touch the spectator’s heart – nothing is more infectious that the passion for the art of filmmaking.

Dynamic shots, when inserted into the rather static composition, aim to set-the-stage, give the spectator a taste of the peculiarities of a certain narrative space. Subtle dynamism enters the Ugana’s frame often when he aims to reverberate the emotional states of his characters, yet it also ‘disturbs’ shots that should or could have been static (Cine-note 1, Cine-note 2).

While the composition of I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn will not win any prizes, Ugana utilizes the visual frame to focus on what breathes emotional life into the narrative: the performances of Ui Mihara, who portrays Shina, and the performance by Estevan Munoz, who plays Jack. Both do an incredible job to give the emotional rhythms of their characters a genuineness and their unlikely romantic coupling believable.   

I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director In Brooklyn might be one of the most pleasant surprises of this year. Ugana’s film does not only have a lot of heart, but also offers a touching celebration of desire and the joys of Z-grade filmmaking. I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director In Brooklyn might even convince some people to finally pursue their love for film.

Notes

Cine-note 1: Ugana, for example, utilizes subtle dynamism to frame the drunken state of Ren and Jack and their emotional interactions – Ren breaks down after vomiting, Jack realizes her beauty as she cries and pukes on the pavement.

Cine-note 2: There are some emotional moments framed with static shots as well.