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It Feels So Good
Movie

It Feels So Good

2019 • Drama, Romance

Woke Score
2
out of 10

Plot

When it rains it pours. Kenji divorced his wife, lost his job and his old squeeze Naoko is getting married back home in the north of Japan, specifically in Akita. He returns there in order to attend her wedding. Naoko surprises him by proposing that they have sex again. The one night stand is the new beginning.

Overall Series Review

The Japanese film is an erotic drama focused on the intense, week-long affair between former lovers, Kenji and Naoko, who reunite in their hometown of Akita just before Naoko's wedding. The narrative is a two-person character study driven by personal history, sexual desire, and a pervasive sense of generational fatalism rooted in the after-effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The film explores personal dysfunction and the search for temporary meaning through passion, often presenting a passive male lead and a highly agentic female lead while directly subverting traditional family structures through infidelity.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics1/10

The film is a culturally authentic Japanese production. Character conflict and narrative focus entirely on the personal failures, desires, and emotional history of the two protagonists. The plot has no reliance on race, intersectional hierarchy, or the vilification of whiteness.

Oikophobia2/10

The mood of fatalism and 'looming dread' is tied to the psychological aftermath of the 3/11 Fukushima disaster. This critiques a specific national catastrophe and its impact on a generation's future, not the wholesale corruption or racism of Japanese civilization, heritage, or ancestors.

Feminism4/10

The central plot is an endorsement of infidelity, as the female lead actively initiates the prolonged affair with her ex-lover just before her wedding. This places personal, non-procreative desire above the institution of marriage and family. The male lead is depicted as divorced, unemployed, and drifting, presenting him as a failure who finds temporary meaning through the female lead's initiation.

LGBTQ+1/10

The narrative is a conventional erotic drama centered on an illicit heterosexual relationship. The deconstruction of the nuclear family occurs through the classical structure of infidelity and divorce, with no evidence of alternative sexual ideology, gender theory, or centering of alternative sexualities.

Anti-Theism2/10

The film operates within a secular worldview where characters face a spiritual vacuum and fatalism following a national disaster. Moral truth is presented as subjective, tied to physical passion and individual desire, but there is no active vilification of religion or religious figures.