#beloved bl

quick pitch

Old Fashion Cupcake 

Japan June 2022 Viki 

9/10

Foundational Romance Tropes? office romance, age gap, employee/boss, food is the love language, coming of age late in life 

This show had me from the moment they broke the egg yolk with the chopsticks in the opening credits for episode one. It’s about a younger man with a long cherished crush on his boss (ten years older and going through a mid life crisis) who decides to save and seduce said man with pancakes. It’s wholesome, comforting, sexy, and a very necessary narrative about still having hope, interests, and openness to affection at any age. It’s coming of age/queerness packaged in a subtle critique of expectations around masculinity and love and loneliness... and it’s beautiful. 

It utilizes hand-held and super close camerawork, long shots, dirty framing, and marvelous acting (stagecraft) from everyone. The directing style it subtle but very precise and tailored dirty framing (AKA lots of objects and other people’s bodies interrupting shots.) 

Notice the frame is only direct and uncluttered when they are eating or being extremely intimate with each other? 

This show manages to make things that shouldn't be sexy so very sexy (like Togawa’s hamster cheeks - boy just wants to gorge himself, and not on food). It's truly art.

But there is so much more going on here.

Japan has a long tradition of using food, both the preparation and consumption, as an allegory for intimacy... ALL KINDS of intimacy (give Tampopo a shot, it’s a remarkable movie). And in this show the discovery of desserts, and the enjoyment of the experience of indulging, is explicitly both sexual seduction and emotional tethering. This is not just an exploration of youth for Nozue it is an exploration of desire and identity.

On the other hand, the want drips off of Togawa at all times, like true starvation. It’s epic levels of pining we are looking at and not just love but pure lust. It’s actually quite remarkable to see this done with Japan’s signature reserve, because the through line of the filming style and food allegory dictates they will simply have to show physical intimacy at soem point. But not of the explicit kind we get in the darker BLs from Japan (although they could easily go there), but of a truly sexualized romantic passionate kind that we don’t normally get from Japan in their softer BLs.

You see, there comes a point, when the food allegory has gone as far as it can, and Nozue recognizes that in episode 3, even as he doesn’t recognize Togawa’s desire. Because for him the desire has been made manifest though the medium of desserts... and now that sensation has been satisfied, he feels like that’s good enough.

But when Nozue shuts down the eating intimacy, Togawa was always destined to break open into into sexual need, just the way the egg yolk is broken open in the credits.

What is truly genius about this show is that when this finally happens at the end of episode 4, the camera switches to one long hand held shot. This kind of stage-craft reliant shooting is the ultimate form of filming intimacy - it is the camera’s form of trust:

The directer is trusting the cameraperson not to waiver,

the camera is trusting the actors to pull through for the entirety of the shot (no forgetting your lines on a long take, no missing your marks, no slipping out of character),

the actors are trusting the crew to capture it in that one moment when they give it their all.

This is the kind of theatrically-based close work is as near to sexual intimacy as actors and crew can get.

Thus the shooting style is, itself, a reflection of Togawa’s needs, of Nozue’s shock and realization and crumbling, of the levels of trust between them that are fracturing and reforming. It’s absolutely brilliant.

All that said I did find the final episode bit of a let down. Narratively it reverted back to pretty standard light Japanese live action yaoi, of the style I talk about here. I did expect a little bit more intimacy from this specific narrative even with Japan at the helm, at least showing the two of them cuddling in bed together or something very domestic if not kissing. I’m not surprised or upset that they returned to status quo, and this is still an amazing comforting unexpected gem of a show, but it’s not the 10/10 I thought it was going to be at the end of 4. 

Still, solid and watchable and 

DEFINITELY RECOMMENDED 

I wrote some more on this show with regards to age gap romance comparing it to Minato’s Laundromat here.