I remember wanting to watch this "Nisennen no Koi / Love 2000" ever since I started watching Japanese dramas, back in 2005/2006. Unfortunately, the English subs available seemed at first glance the product of a machine translation, often unintelligible as they were, so I had ended up putting it aside.....until I've recently found it again, this time with beautifully done French subs (pardon, "sous-titres" ^___-).
And so I watched it after all those years....you can imagine that after such a looong wait, my expectations were pretty high; and I'm happy to be able to say that it didn't let me down. Quite the contrary!
Despite the somehow implausible premise (you'll have to boost your "suspension of disbelief" powers quite a bit to accept this imaginary country in the Urals where people apparently speak among themselves either in Japanese, Russian or English! >__<), the script sill managed to develop that brilliantly and pretty much realistically (newsflash: if you thought that spies had anything - even remotely - to do with James Bond's fantasy world, well, think again; the ugly and gritty truth is a lot closer to what we have here - murder, lies, betrayal).
The cast did also temendously well (with honorable mentions for the gorgeous Nakayama Miho, the great Kaneshiro Takeshi, and last but not least for the übersexy "Fayray" - wow, that singer sure is a looker!)
A beautiful OST coupled with a fine production value wrapped up the whole thing very nicely.
What's not to like? 10/10!