3 days ago
'Glass Heart': A flashy rock fairytale scrubbed of grit
There are drum rolls and eye rolls aplenty during 'Glass Heart,' Netflix's extravagantly insubstantial musical drama about a college student who gets plucked from obscurity to play drums in Japan's hottest new band.
Tenblank is the latest venture of Naoki Fujitani (Takeru Satoh), a reclusive musical genius who just can't help being brilliant and looking gorgeous all the time. He's enlisted some top-class collaborators — session guitarist Sho Takaoka (Keita Machida) and keyboardist/track maker Kazushi Sakamoto (Jun Shison) — compared to whom new recruit Akane Saijo (Yu Miyazaki) looks like an enthusiastic amateur.
However, Naoki knows she's the right person for the job: They've already jammed together during the show's ludicrous opening sequence, in which they somehow manage to have a duet while he's playing grand piano on a rain-soaked festival stage and she's out in the car park. Don't worry, there's plenty more where that came from.
'I'm sure this sound was a gift from the gods,' Akane declares in voiceover, and 'Glass Heart' is forever reminding you about how great the music you're listening to is. The show drafts in a host of songwriting talent — most notably Radwimps frontman Yojiro Noda and music producer Yaffle — to ensure that Naoki's songs consistently sound like something you might hear on the Spotify Top 50 Japan playlist, albeit without a common signature that would make them feel like the work of a single person.
Tenblank's success is preordained, so the show has to find drama in other places: professional and personal rivalries; medical complications; plot contrivances so clunky they're almost funny. Naohito Fujiki gets to embody the evils of the industry as music producer Ichidai Isagi, a Salieri to Naoki's Mozart who's been left creatively impotent since parting ways with his former collaborator. Yet there's a striking lack of friction to the whole thing. This rock fairytale has the sanitized feel of one of those musical biopics that's been pre-approved by the artist's estate.
Although 'Glass Heart' is based on a series of light novels by Mio Wakagi, its central narrative is pure shōjo manga (girls' comic) stuff, as Akane falls in love with Naoki while attracting the amorous advances of another bandmate. It should be swoon-inducing, but the conspicuous age gap between Miyazaki and her co-star makes it as awkward as Satoh's onscreen coupling with Nana Mori in 'April, Come She Will' (2024).
If you just want to see Satoh (who also produces) playing a rock star, 'Glass Heart' more than delivers. He's in his element during the concert sequences, shot with thousands of extras at musical meccas including Tokyo's Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall.
The band members aren't too shabby, either. Miyazaki has an endearing energy, while Machida is well cast as Sho, even if he has to wait until episode eight before he gets anything interesting to do. Shison, sporting thick-rimmed specs and a center part, seems to be cosplaying as Takuya Kimura's character from hit 1990s series 'Asunaro Hakusho' (a suspicion that's confirmed when he re-creates one of that show's most famous scenes).
'Glass Heart' goes out on a triumphant high, with an episode-length concert performance that's clearly modeled on the finale of 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' It's a rousing climax, but there's no escaping the sense that Netflix has blown an enormous amount of cash on a nearly seven-hour music video.
