Have you ever had a new kid in your class? First day of school is not easy for new kids. And sometimes movies get it right and sometimes they get it wrong. What if the new kid starts with, “I’m only here a month, so I don’t need a friend.” Would you befriend that kid?
No, of course you wouldn’t.
If you were going to school with that kid, you’d shy away from him and spread rumors with your friends behind his back. Yah, you would. And as an adult, you’d feel like a piece of crap.
Yuki (Shion Matsufuji) is a thespian brat, as opposed to an army brat. That’s a new one for me, although I imagine it was more common in the “run off to the circus” days of the world. Yuki was born to a family in a traveling theater troupe. Both of his biological parents are gone, and now he belongs to the troupe leader. Now in junior high school, Yuki goes through the motions of being a student; he attends but talks to no one and leaves early. His future is in acting. He already plays a geisha in half the plays the troupe puts on.
Yuki’s teacher forces him to meet Ken (Jun Saito), a smart kid who has leveraged parental death into never attending school. Ken’s rebelliousness inspires Yuki. And suddenly Yuki wants to get decent grades and maybe be more than just an actor.
I couldn’t help thinking of my favorite David Letterman sketch when I saw his “father” complain … (to paraphrase): “Say, Yuki, you’ve been doing an awful lot of homework, 
don’t you wanna do some acting?”
The problem with Confetti is two-fold: It’s a coming-of-age film, so we can expect a fair amount of small-moment exaggeration, yet these moments don’t come until the last five minutes of film. Until then, the picture is pretty dull. In addition to that issue, the film didn’t seem quite ready to go all in on LGBTQ. It is as if the film itself in the closet hoping we will notice that our young hero doesn’t want to be samurai or shogun; he likes playing feminine roles and might have a crush on his new male friend, although it is 100% impossible to tell for sure.
Confetti is certainly a well-meaning film, if both a little slow and a little dull. I don’t care if our hero likes wearing kimonos and shuns girls; I care that our hero makes more than one expression during the course of 80 minutes. He really doesn’t, which makes it hard to know what he or the film is going for. Confetti is a decent coming-of-age exploration, but only in the context of “not enough coming-of-age” films happening.
There was once a tween boy named Yuki
Who thought school was one giant dookie
Yet he found a new friend
Suddenly life did depend
On Ken showing up at his kabuki
Not Rated, 80 Minutes
Director: Naoya Fujita
Writer: Suzuyuki Kaneko
Genre: LGBTQ, maybe?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: World-weary kids
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The parents that try to ground them
