User Reviews

Story about a girl that comes out to Tokyo looking for her boy friend, but ends up becoming an apprentice cake maker.

Natsume Usuba (Yu Aoi) shows up at the confectionery Koandoru from Kagoshima looking for her boy friend. The owner Yoriko (Keiko Toda) tells her that he left. Natsume asks to become the apprentice at the confectionery. Her selling point is that she comes from a home that is also a confectionery. Yoriko accepts, but Natsume isn't quite up to Koandoru's standard. Shortly after, she finds where her boy friend is. She meets him at the park, but he already has a new girlfriend. Shocked, she protests, but he insists that he's already broke up with her. Depressed, she returns back to the bakery, but more trouble awaits her.

Very sorry to say this, but Yu Aoi is a pretty bad actor. Only thing she's got going for her is raw power. Director Yoshihiro Fukagawa has been directing sub B grade movies, and this might be his best effort, but he really doesn't know how to make the actors enunciate their lines properly. Yosuke Eguchi really doesn't look like the person he's playing (the master cake maker). Keiko Toda lacks charm.

So unfortunately, the production fell short of expectation. The characters really didn't deliver the personality they could have.

Maybe everyone was asked to do bit more than they were capable, and the movie ended up the way it is.

The story is about a girl named Natsume, that visits Tokyo because her ex-boyfriend moved there. Having helped her father in his local cake shop before, she ends up realizing her love of baking while in Tokyo and decides to train under the chef at the store her loser boyfriend left; the "Patisserie Coin de rue". There, she learns the ropes, and also meets Tomura, who was a well known Patissier, but had stopped baking because his daughter died in an accident while he was baking (he forgot to pick her up from school). Natsume manages to him back to baking because her boss is in the hospital. The rest of the movie shows Natsume and Tomura, working together to prepare for a banquet. Also the movie shows Natsume maturing and realizing her own dreams. It also shows us many pastries and delicious looking desserts. I love food themed J-Dramas and movies, like "Dinner", "Hungry!" and so on, so I really enjoyed this one too. It really was nice to see all the customers and their smiles after eating the desserts that were displayed in the drama. Albeit this is a very slow paced movie, it is a Japanese movie made in the best tradition of Japanese storytelling, it's definitely not a movie for the mass audience. But for people whom enjoy a movie with a story elegantly told and also very elegantly filmed this movie is a must watch.