Arte offers this night the documentary perfect boyfriend, on a phenomenon in Japan. The film focuses on fans of a video game that became cult in the country ten years ago. This game consists of making a virtual girlfriend with whom you can interact, on the model of a tamagotchi. The documentary follows three diligent gamers who try to become “perfect boyfriends” on this platform, even if it means sometimes forgetting reality and neglecting the real women around them.
A film from a walk in a Japanese seaside town
At the microphone of Europe 1, co-director Alain della Negra explains how the idea for this documentary came to him. “We walked around Atami, a seaside town not far from Tokyo. In a temple, we saw little love wishes, which are called Emma. There were many that were intended for a character from video game”, he explains in Media culture.
Alain Della Negra continues: “In the city, we found lots of small traces in addition to this virtual world. It was in fact some players who had decided to come to the place reproduced in the video game, because the virtual character of the video game asks us to go to Atami for the weekend. Players go there with their console and are welcomed in bars, restaurants, like real couples. That’s what interested us.”
“We wanted to translate a melancholy”
The documentary is also an opportunity to discover contemporary Japan and its flaws. Alain della Negra co-directed it with his partner, who is Japanese. “We have two very different points of view,” he said. “She approached it from a very critical point of view, because Japan is the last developed country in terms of gender equality, and by far. Me, it was a much more fascinated look at all these methods”, evokes the co-director.
Between the two, there was all the same a common point of view. “We both wanted to translate a kind of melancholy. In Japan, there is a very low birth rate. This allowed us to understand how single men lived, how they replaced this need for affection with technology”, says Alain della Negra. The documentary is broadcast at 12:25 a.m. tonight on Arte, and for early-birds, it is already available in full on arte.tv.