Set in a dreamlike rural Japan, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy’s attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmaker’s desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. Gossiping women wear sinister eye patches. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake body inflated by a dwarf. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.
Tag: JAPAN
Three Japanese pilgrims arrive in India. Miss Naruse is looking for Otsu, a Catholic priest, her lover ten years before; after time in France and Israel, he has come to Benares where he carries the bodies of the poor to the crematorium. Her life is empty and, although Otsu was her lover only as a joke, she is now drawn to his spiritual nature. Mr. Isobe searches for a village child who may be the reincarnation of his dead wife. Mr. Yagusi comes to pray for the man who saved his life in World War II, a man haunted for 50 years by the means he used to save his comrade. Pantheism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity meet on the shores of the Ganges in these characters.
Tetsuro, a handsome but over-age college student, meets Shino, a beautiful but virtuous saki-shop waitress and falls in love with her. The Long Darkness is a long, solemn, ponderous modern love story set in Tokyo and in parts of northern Japan.
Tachibana has completed his three years in prison and returns to the streets. He and his old cell mate wants a new life as ex-prisoners, but by chance they come across some jewels from a bloody bank robbery.
In postwar Japan a young woman is unable to marry her sweetheart because her family’s in difficult circumstances and needs her income to keep afloat.
Shot over a period of two years, and with unprecedented access to the Aum sect accused of mass killing with Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, this astonishing documentary by Tatsuya Mori offers a complex view of subjects as diverse as personal responsibility, public responses to terrorism, surveillance, and individual rights.
Ishihara Kiyoshi plans to marry the woman he loves, Chiee, a coffee shop girl. After an accident, Chiee loses her memory. A romance movie whose original work by Ayako Sono was made into a melodrama by a combination of Shinoda Masahiro and Terayama Shuji.
After narrowly surviving a traumatic brain injury, macho pro boxer Eiji Adachi (Hidekazu Akai) puts his life on the line for another chance at boxing glory—vying for a comeback despite the seriousness of his condition. A hyper-masculine brute with a devil-may-care attitude, the hot-tempered Adachi starts again from the ground up, launching his own Osaka training gym with the hopes of returning to the ring. At times comically absurd, Sakamoto’s film brings a satirical yet bleak approach to the self-destructive nature of the boxer, further bolstered by the very fact that the film is based on the life and career of lead actor Akai himself.