Japanese filmmaker Kôji Fukada may have a fondness for the conventions of genre, but there’s nothing conventional about how he puts them to work. The Real Thing (2019) begins with a romcom staple—the meet-cute—as Tsuji and Ukiyo cross paths in a convenience store. He’s a salaryman coasting on his charms; she’s an emotional wrecking ball—a “manic pixie dream girl” with an emphasis on the manic. When Ukiyo’s car stalls on a railway crossing moments later, sending Tsuji rushing to her aid, the stage appears to be set for all the familiar story tropes to roll into action.

The Real Thing doesn’t disavow the myriad pleasures of the romcom, and allows these two star-crossed lovers to pinball between incidents that variously draw them together and pull them apart. But in telling their story over time, Fukada contrives an elastic effect, stretching the will-they-won’t-they adages of every romcom’s second act to seemingly infinite degrees. A plot description can’t distinguish The Real Thing from countless other romantic comedies, but as a viewing experience it’s as close to the teasingly circuitous narrative labyrinths of Jacques Rivette as it is the heart-tuggers of Richard Curtis—not for nothing does Fukada begin and end his opus with a map straight out of the French New Wave icon’s Le Pont du Nord (1981). Scene by scene, episode by episode, Fukada holds catharsis just out of reach for his characters and audience alike, reveling in repetition until the possibility of love or closure resembles a Sisyphean struggle that touches the absurd.

While The Real Thing was re-edited into a feature film for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, it originally aired on Japanese television as a ten-episode miniseries. Both cuts are effectively the same, but the form of the miniseries serves to amplify Fukada’s subversion of expectations. Episodes begin and end mid-scene, until a climactic pay-off that might just be the last word in delayed gratification.