If you have any interest in manga or comics generally, you have probably read Fumi Yoshinaga’s fantastic 4-volume series Antique Bakery (and if you haven’t, shame on you: run-don’t-walk to your local bookstore or library and get it right now). Besides being critically adored and award-winning, it was also hugely popular in Japan; enough so to spawn a TV miniseries, an animated series, and now a Korean live-action film adaptation (sound warning: trailer will play upon loading), which instantly became one of Korea’s top-grossing homegrown movies ever.
Because it is awesome.
The manga is a witty, deftly-written ensemble comedy with dramatic underpinnings about four eccentric men who open a bakery in a Japanese suburb, their convoluted and angsty backstories, assorted slice-of-life vignettes of the customers who come to buy their pastries, and of course lushly detailed spreads of mouthwatering desserts. The film has all that, plus gratuitous male nudity and more guy-on-guy face-sucking than you can shake a bâton du pèlerin at. Woot.
Tachibana* is a rich layabout who has no luck with relationships and a traumatic childhood incident he can remember nothing about, which leads him to open the bakery (in a former antique shop, hence the name) even though he doesn’t like cake (reeeealy doesn’t like cake). Ono, master pâtissere and “Gay of Demonic Charm”, has been booted from every four-star restaurant in two countries, despite his incomparable pastry-making genius, for causing romantic havoc in the kitchen; he ends up at Tachibana’s two-bit establishment because Tachibana is apparently the only man on earth resistant to his thermonuclear hottitude. (Tachibana, as it turns out, is the guy who who viciously rejected Ono’s shy coming-out advances back in high school.) Kanda is a ex-teen gang member and former boxer whose first taste of Ono’s cakes causes a near-religious conversion experience, and who demands to be taken on as an apprentice. Chikage is Tachibana’s clutzy, dunderheaded bodyguard-cum-ward who serves as waiter and comic foil (and whom Ono promptly falls for, for absolutely no perceptible reason, though this doesn’t get much play in the movie).
Since the manga is a mainstream josei production and not actually yaoi, Ono’s sexual exploits are kept mostly off-screen, so as not to offend the reader’s delicate sensibilities. The movie, on the other hand, plays heavily to a large demographic underserved by the previous adaptations - drooling fangirls (and presumably fanboys) who want to see Ono get naked and mack on everything in pants -, and therefore dials up the homoeroticism 5000%. (The trailer -Youtube- makes it seem like Antique sould be billed as “starring Kim Jae-wook’s delectable body, osculatory muscles and cake”, which isn’t quite true.)
In among the cake-making, character studies, and exploration of Tachibana’s dark and mysterious backstory, Ono (doe-eyed prettyboy Kim Jae-wook) parties in gay clubs and goes in hot pursuit of Tachibana (Joo Ji-hoon) (a relationship which essentially doesn’t exist in the manga). Then his ex-boss and former lover shows up from Paris to get him back (in bed but more importantly in his new restaurant at the Ritz), allowing the movie to throw in nearly-naked French hotness (Andy Gillet) and steamy gay making out (the film is rated 15+ in Korea, so there’s no actual sex, but still). Angst ensues, since Ono leaving will kill the shop.
Plot spoiler 1:
Of course, he blows off fame, fortune, and hot Frenchmen to stay in [del]Japan[/del] Korea with his friends. What, you think it was going to have a downer ending?
Plot spoiler 2:
On the other hand, Tachibana’s unresolved trauma stays unresolved, which is downer enough.
Overall, the film is more dramatic and less comedic than the manga, verging on tear-jerker status in spots; in going from a four-volume series to a under-two-hour movie the script chose to omit most of the lighter, less plot-important episodes and focus largely on Tachibana’s unpleasant backstory and its modern-day fallout, and the dark bits seem darker in live-action than in short, elliptical flashbacks. It does keep some of the all-flashback-all-the-time esthetic of the manga, which works markedly less well in film, so you’ll probably enjoy it more (and make more sense of the plot) if you’ve read the books. The director also likes gratuitous, often-annoying voice-overs, and a lot of potentially confusing symbolism in the angsty bits. For some reason, there’s also many Busby Berkeley-esque musical numbers scored to bouncy K-pop ditties at random moments. On the plus side, the characters are compelling, the story is solid, and it is a very good-looking movie (not just the eye candy). And there’s cake.
In short, if your interests in life include Fumi Yoshinaga, cake, hot seminaked men, homoerotic kissing, foreign films, relationship drama, dramatic comedies or cake, this may be the best $30 purchase you will ever make. Currently it’s only available as a region 3 DVD (Southeast Asia) (with English subtitles, which are pretty good except for a few typos); hopefully there will eventually be a US-region release, but in the meantime there are various semi-legal ways of getting around the region encoding.
*The movie transposes the action to Korea and gives everyone Korean names. I can’t keep them straight, so I’ll stick with the Japanese. Here’s a cheatsheet:
Tachibana = Kim Jin-hyeok
Ono = Min Seon-woo
Kanda = Yang Ki-beom
Chikage = Nam Soo-yeong