That leads to an initial sex scene both awkward and tender, and constantly remarked upon in other reviews: Sandy puts on Hiro's trousers, climbs on him and the two make love. What does wearing the trousers mean? That the only way past the impasse of their cultures is for her to slip into his clothing? That the only way past his initial sexism is to literally wear the pants in the coupling? That she needs clothing initially because she fears intimacy? All of the above?

But then, the film also suggests, perhaps we cannot know all there is to know about a person. The scene where Sandy screams at her mother for presuming to know what the Japanese are like spoke to something in me: people - both Asians and non-Asians - like to say "well, Asians are like that". But all we can say, really, is generally people of a certain nationality might behave in certain ways. How much can we say or know about an individual? Easy enough to pigeonhole Hiro, but this is a man who hid the existence of his family; a man who has poetry in him; a man who was boorish; a man who hates karaoke - in other words, an individual.

*** (spoiler ahead) ***

Events in the film take a sudden turn halfway through, with the death of Hiro. The scene where the couple's stuck SUV gets out of the bog and Hiromitsu jumps up and down in celebration is pure unbridled joy, and I was genuinely affected thinking about it later on, at the moment of Hiro's death. Which leads to the central question in thinking about the film: what to make of Hiro's sudden death? When he died I thought of the abrupt ending of the Mill on the Floss, with pages upon pages of aching emotions and turmoil ended by a sudden flood. (I also thought of the abrupt death by spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, but we'll leave that aside.) There's a stark sense of sadness at Hiro's loss of life just at the moment that he's found himself, but the ending makes the death somehow redemptive. In a way, death enabled Hiro to avoid the natural, inevitable closing of his now-open heart.

In the end, there's a lot on the value of things left unsaid: Hiro's wife, coming to Australia to claim the body, looks through the photos of Sandy and Hiro, and passes Hiro's note on to her. Perhaps Sandy and Hiro, affectionate as they are, could not really have bridged the language gap in the long run. Perhaps aspects about each other would've driven the other mad. Perhaps. But there was a joy in the transience itself: he came into her life, and she came into his, a sparkling moment, all the sadder for being abruptly cut short.

(From dsng.net)