A 15-year-old girl is orphaned when her parents die right before her eyes. This shock opening of Natsuki Seta’s “Worlds Apart” is the reverse of the usual tendency of Japanese filmmakers to focus on the parents of a missing or deceased child. (See Keisuke Yoshida’s “Missing” for a recent example.
) Based on a Tomoko Yamashita manga, the film’s delicately told— if sometimes discursive— story goes light on grieving: Whatever trauma Asa (Ikoi Hayase) experienced doesn’t draw tears. Instead, she identifies her parents’ bodies and attends their funeral with a surface composure. When her novelist aunt, Makio (Yui Aragaki), asks her if she is sad, her answer is, “I don’t know.
” Makio is not sad at all: She hated her judgmental older sister with a passion. But when she hears relatives talking callously about Asa’s fate at the funeral, she decides on the spot to become the girl’s guardian. There is awkwardness as Asa settles in, but the film doesn’t play it for laughs.
Makio tells Asa up front she isn’t sure if she can ever love her. And she confesses to a friendly lawyer (Koji Seto), who was once her lover, that she is “terrified” about her new responsibility. Meanwhile, Asa becomes furious with her best friend, the voluble Emiri (Rina Komiyama), for spreading the news about her parents’ death around their middle school just before graduation: She wants normality, not sympathy.
Luckily, her aunt proves to be a tolerant, understanding type for .
