A Swiss sailor jumps ship in Lisbon, tired of the noisy engine room, the ship. He rents a room and does little. He writes letters to his lover, describing the whiteness of the city, the solitude and the silence. He sends his love and emptiness; she replies with love and confusion.
Riko, a suicide-obsessed young woman, meets up with K, an angry young man whose dream is to blow out all of existence. Together, they join up with three other would-be terrorists on an errand to deliver a “cake” to an unspecified location somewhere in Tokyo.
Five boys and a girl make up a gang and are fans of Beat bands, following them from concert to concert. Juli, fiancée of one of the boys, falls in love with a musician and travels to the countryside with him for a gig. The jealous fiancé and his friends go after them and the whole affair comes close to violence when suddenly the lover allows Juli to make her own choice. This noble gesture rekindles Juli’s true love for him.
Three attractive young women who run a men’s clothing store also share living arrangements. They have grown quite bored with the usual pick-up scene, with its endless series of one-night stands. When a suitably attractive and virginal young man, Georg Hermes, comes in looking for a suit, they collectively decide to adopt him as their boyfriend.
Chris Luger, a fascistic psychopath from The Hague, kidnaps the simple-minded daughter of a millionaire. Her dad refuses to pay the ransom.
A young insect buff from Hokkaido captures a Papilio memnon butterfly, which is not supposed to be present in that area. The larva of a Papilio memnon sticks to someone in Nagasaki and sets out on a journey to the east. As the larva travels to Hagi, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Osaka, Hong Kong, Yokohama, and Tokyo, various loves and human dramas unfold.
A couple is pursued by the police and citizens of a city for the crime of having invented love. In every corner of the city, on the walls of the bars, on the doors of public buildings, in the windows of the bus, even that wall ruined through radio ads and detergents in the small shop window, where no one enters the lobby of the railway station which was the home of our hope of escape, a poster denounces our love.
Durian Durian is a two-part film split between Mongkok’s Portland Street in Hong Kong and the north-eastern border region of mainland China. Ah Fan, the young girl from Little Cheung, lives in the former with her poor family, originally from Shenzhen, who illegally overstayed their three month visas to scrape together an income washing dishes and selling cigarettes. Fan meets Yan, a prostitute from the mainland, in a laneway behind Portland Street. They become friends after Yan’s pimp is assaulted in front of Fan by an assailant wielding that most dangerous of weapons, a heavy, sharply spiney-skinned durian fruit. Yan returns to the north-east to invest what she has earned after her three month Hong Kong visa expires.
