Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Devil is a Woman

Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) was based on La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) by Pierre Louys, an 1898 novel that was also the basis of Luis Bunuel’s 1977 masterpiece That Obscure Object of Desire. Louys is also famed for his more explicit erotica such as Trois Filles de Leur Mere, published anonymously in 1926, a year after his death in Paris. Bunuel’s version was co-written by Jean-Claude Carriere and starred Fernando Rey as Mathieu and both Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet in the role of the bedeviling tease Conchita. In Von Sternberg’s version, which was written by John Dos Passos, Marlene Dietrich plays the Sevillian flamenco dancer Concha Perez, a fiercely independent woman with “ice for a heart” who beguiles Lionel Atwill as “Pasqualito” and Edward Everett Horton as “Paquitito,” as she affectionately nicknames them (look for Cesar Romero in a small role as well). The film, like Bunuel’s, is told in a series of flashbacks, here to the tune of "El Gato Montes" and other pasodobles. Much of the story was told visually through the bars of iron gates and fences as well as in the presence of caged birds, reinforcing the theme of Atwill's imprisonment by becoming more and more elaborate as the movie progresses. As they return home together one night, Dietrich declares “Look mama I caught a fish,” holding up a goldfish in a glass bowl. Even as she repeatedly rebuffs Atwill's amorous advances, she ensnares him deeper and deeper into an intricate emotional plexus; he offers protection from worry (and cash to her mother) but she insists that she does not want a father or husband or any man to control her. Yet when he violently beats her, she returns to him in the morning happier than ever. Though difficult to accept Dietrich as Spanish, the film features the memorable song “he gives me butter and carrots and onions that no other farmer would . . . and other things that are so good.” Filmed in Hollywood, this was Von Sternberg and Dietrich’s last film together, ending a famed collaboration that included Morocco (1930), The Blue Angel (1930), Blonde Venus (1932), and Shanghai Express (1932). Von Sternberg later made the sly Shanghai Gesture (1941) with Gene Tierney and Victor Mature. La Femme et le Pantin was also filmed by Julien Duvivier in 1958, starring Brigitte Bardot and Antonio Vilar, though it plays considerably more dated and straightforward than either the Von Sternberg or Bunuel versions of the same novel.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

His Kind of Woman

His Kind of Woman (1951) was a kind of film-noirette set in Mexico and made by RKO, starring Robert Mitchum as the sap Dan Milner and Jane Russell as singer Lenore Brent. The production, like many headed by Howard Hughes, was filled with false starts, conflicting direction, jealousy, pride, envy, etc. The film was directed by John Farrow, better known for The Big Clock (1948) with Ray Milland and Maureen O’Sullivan (Farrow's longtime wife) and Hondo (1953) with John Wayne and Geraldine Page--who is always slightly disturbing once you've seen Don Siegel’s Civil War film The Beguiled (1971) with Clint Eastwood. Farrow also wrote the screenplay to the excellent adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956) starring David Niven and Cantinflas. Filmed by Harry Wild, whose credits include Johnny Angel (1945), Murder My Sweet (1945), and Macao (1952), His Kind of Woman traces the story of loner Mitchum on vacation at a seaside Mexican resort and his involvement with Russell; Raymond Burr as mobster Nick Ferraro; Vincent Price as vacationing actor Mark Cardigan. Like all noirs, the film addresses the whims of fate and the hidden motivations behind courtship, crime, and love. Jane Russell’s name “Lenore” is nearly synonymous with young death, as it was used repeatedly in the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe (Price's presence reinforces the connection to Poe). A film that does not quite live up to the sum of its many parts, it is still a work of note for any fan of Mitchum, Russell, Price, Burr, Hughes, RKO, movies set in Mexico, or all of the above.

Monday, July 27, 2009

D.C. Cab

One of the funniest movies of the 1980s, D.C. Cab (1983) delivers hilarious comedy and first-rate social commentary at the same time in way that few films can match. As a kid, everyone saw this movie in the theater as it was Mr. T's follow-up to Rocky III and premiered during the first season of The A-Team. D.C. Cab was one of many "inspirational" movies that came out from 1976-1986 (look it up) but one of the very few that offered such an obvious critique of the Reagan administration by calling for collective action over personal glory (the film's locale was the first hint). Directed by Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys), the film is the story of the wide-eyed Albert Hockenberry who comes to the inner city to work at the cab company owned by Harold, his deceased father's buddy from Vietnam. D.C. Cab, of course, is the misfit cab company, employing the indigent, indulgent, and apathetic alike. It is also extremely diverse, from the cross-dressing Tyrone to the would-be ladies man Xavier to the Barbarian Brothers. Will this motley group band together to save D.C. Cab? The film stars: Max Gail, Mr. T, Gary Busey, Bill Maher (yes, that Bill Maher), Paul Rodriguez, Jill Schoelen, and features Timothy Carey in one of his last screen roles as well as 1980s sensation Irene Cara ("Flashdance," "Fame") as herself. The cinematography was by Dean Cundley, a John Carpenter regular who pioneered the use of the steadicam on Halloween, and who also filmed The Fog, Escape From New York, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future ,Romancing the Stone, Jurassic Park, and Roadhouse.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

The Sex-Killer

Barry Mahon's voyeuristic The Sex-Killer (1966) has been one of my favorite films from Something Weird Video for some time, having purchased a VHS copy from their catalog about 15 years ago. Filmed on location in New York in (what appears to be) 16mm black & white, The Sex-Killer is the surreal and strange story of Tony, a creepy and reclusive worker in a Garment District mannequin factory. Tony’s favorite hobby, when not trying to sneak broken mannequins home with him for “dates” at a local bar, is to utilize his high-powered binoculars from the roof of his building on unsuspecting sunbathers (there was apparently a lot of nude rooftop sunbathing in those days). The film features Uta Erickson, Helena Clayton, Rita Bennett (a Mahon regular), and Sharon Kent as Tony’s various girlfriends/murder victims. Mahon was a film producer, director, writer, and cinematographer of various mid-sixties Z-grade movies. His directorial canon betrays a common theme: She Should Have Stayed in Bed (1963), Bunny Yeager's Nude Camera (1963), Nudes on Tiger Reef (1965), Nudes Inc. (1965), The Love Cult (1966), and P.P.S. - The Prostitutes Protective Society (1966). His first feature, however, was called Cuban Rebel Girls aka Assault of the Rebel Girls (1959), which was co-written by and starred Errol Flynn in his last screen role, along with his 16-year old girlfriend Beverly Aadland. Flynn plays himself as a war correspondent, assisting Fidel Castro’s revolution against the Batista government. Flynn, who lived in Havana at the time, also appeared in the amazing lost-documentary by Victor Pahlen called "The Truth about Fidel Castro Revolution," recently released as Cuban Story. Barry Mahon, who had become close friends with Flynn, had a life story to match the tales recounted in Flynn’s hilarious autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways (also released in 1959, the year of Flynn’s death at age 50). Born and raised in California, Mahon volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1941 months before Pearl Harbor, earning an outstanding reputation as a fighter pilot before being shot down over the ocean on August 19 1942. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he was held at Stalag Luft III, where he helped dig the escape tunnels made famous by the John Sturges film The Great Escape (1963). The baseball-tossing character of Captain Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, was partly based on Mahon.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Simon of the Desert

Simon of the Desert was Luis Bunuel's last film made in Mexico, released in 1965. One of the few movies based on an original story by Bunuel, its source material was the life of Saint Simeon Stylites--a Fourth Century hermit who spent 37 years atop a 60-foot column outside of Aleppo (modern day Syria). In My Last Sigh Bunuel wrote that he was first introduced to Simeon Stylites by Federico Garica Lorca, who had given him a copy of Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Column (written circa 1260-1275), a kind of a cult-book lives of the saints that was very popular in Medieval Europe. The book detailed Simeon's diet and excrement, which amused Bunuel and Lorca when they were students in Madrid. The rest of the story was researched at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. Though many scenes of the film were cut (or never shot), the film won 5 awards at the Venice Film Festival including the Special Jury Prize. At 45 minutes long, the film (still rarely shown in movie theaters) stars Claudio Brook as Simon and Sylvia Pinal as the trickster Satan, arriving to tempt Simon in various disguises including a bearded Jesus carrying a lamb, in a self-propelled coffin, and as a school-girl in a sailor suit complete with stockings and suspender belt. Pinal, a popular Mexican actress who had starred in Bunuel's other two last Mexican films, the brilliant Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962), was excellent as the temptress devil, revealing her legs, exposing her breasts, and caressing the beard of the implacable Simon del desierto. Shot by Gabriel Figueroa and edited by Carlos Savage, the film presents the absurdity of Catholicism while at the same time exposing Bunuel's basic belief in a higher ascetic lifestyle. Motifs, of course, abound as well: women's legs, ants, solitude, the dual nature of freedom/enslavement. The most shocking aspect of Simon of the Desert, upon rewatching, is how closely the film prefigures many visual and narrative elements of his later work in France (usually viewed as a stylistic break from his Mexican films). The shots are so similar that you could dissolve from Silvia Pinal's legs directly onto Jeanne Moreau's in Diary of a Chambermaid and wind up in another century and country. Of course, that is exactly what happens in Simon of the Desert as well, as Pinal takes Simon (via airplane) to the very bottom depths of hell (for Bunuel): a Greenwich Village disco where the kids dance the last dance aka the "Radioactive Flesh." Simon, his beard closley trimmed, idly smokes a pipe as he sits alone amongst the pre-hippy crowd. The overhead shots of the East River and Manhattan skyline were perhaps Bunuel's only filmed of New York (I cannot think of any others). Simon of the Desert's disjointed narrative/fantasy structure (which he had not used in this way before) also foreshadowed both Belle de Jour (1967) and The Milky Way (1969). The column used for Simon was too heavy to move and remains today in the field in Mexico where they filmed the movie.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Spellbound (1945)

There was a near-riot at MOMA last week during Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) when the audience at a 4:30pm screening mistook the 5 minute overture for an incompetent and/or sleeping projectionist. Yelling, shouting, and a strange dirge-like clapping were met by reactionary counter-yelling and bemused laughter until someone finally called out "this movie premiered with an overture!" The restlessness, panic, and anxiety that these darkened 5 minutes provoked whipped the elderly would-be hooligans in the crowd to a frenzy--you can't imagine just how close they were to ripping up the seats and storming the projection booth. Starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck (in his first major role), the film was written by Hollywood legend Ben Hecht, who also wrote His Girl Friday (1940), Notorious (1946), and Kiss of Death (1947). Peck played Dr. Anthony Edwardes, the newly-arrived director of the secluded clinic Green Manors, where he meets Bergman's Dr. Constance Petersen, a sexually-repressed psychoanalyst (Hitchocock and Hecht were not shy with the "librarian" and "egg-beater" jokes). The David O. Selznick production featured the famous dream-sequence painted and choreographed by Salvador Dali and a theremin-heavy score written by Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa. The innate connections between Hitchcock and Luis Bunuel were most apparent in Spellbound; though the Dali sequence remains the most obvious, with Dali cutting eyeballs with giant scissors in an homage to Un Chien Andalou, Peck's journey through the Labrynth of the Guilt Complex directly anticipated Bunuel's Rehearsal For a Crime (1955) by commenting on childhood murder-fantasy and the return of the repressed. Peck's amnesia, however, was not triggered by a long-lost music box but rather through visual stimuli, which provided reason for one of Hitchcock's most macabre shots of all time. Another basic connection between the two masters of (surrealist) cinema is Hitchcock's latent Catholicism, which was here on full display, expressed as usual in fetishism and guilt. This particular screening was perhaps one-of-a-kind, as the near riot amidst the suffocating smell of the Bloomingdale's perfume counter added a heightened anticipation of violence and was the perfect set-up for the psychological thriller. The film features Hitchcock trademarks such as projected backgrounds, visual-textual juxtapositions (i.e. Peck and Bergman declaring that it is not love between them as they kiss for the first time), as well as beautiful shots of Old Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Tony Manero

Tony Manero (2009), which opened at Cinema Village this month, is a disturbing and important film set in Pinochet's Santiago, circa 1978, when the cold reality of the United States-backed coup, thousands of political executions, constant surveillance by secret police, a steady stream of exiles, and forced free-market economics were converging into a feel of permanence over Chile. Under military dictatorship, political repression becomes paralleled by personal detachment; silence rules over discussion; life becomes cheap. Directed by Pablo Larrain, the film starred Alfredo Castro (who was also co-writer with Larrain and Mateo Iribarren) as Raul/Tony Manero, a loser in his mid-50s caught between Pinochet and Travolta. On surface level, the film is a dark comedy about a Saturday Night Fever-impersonator who will kill, literally, for his art. But the film is pure tragedy, and Tony's cold-blooded obsession was not played with a wink to the audience ala American movies. Castro's performance was matched in empty ruthlessness (glass) brick by brick by that of the film's co-stars (and Tony's co-stars in their Saturday Night Fever act performed at a local cafe): Amparo Noguera (as Cony, his lover), Paola Lattus (as Pauli, Cony's daughter), Héctor Morales (as Goyo, Pauli's socialist boyfriend) and Elsa Poblete (as Wilma-the cafe owner). The women were the true emotional touchstones of the film, strange combinations of resilience, resignation, and desperation who (each) cling to Tony in spite of his impotence, emptiness, and distraction (perhaps the common man under Pinochet). Strange, disturbing, and ugly, the film presents a narrative of modern South America that is far removed from the poetry of Garcia Marquez or Borges or the Chile of Bolano or Jodorowsky. The sometimes blurry, hand-held scenes, filmed by Sergio Armstrong and edited by Andrea Chignoli, add to the movie's overall feeling of dislocation and detachment. Tony Manero (the film and character) does not simply take Saturday Night Fever as a starting point, instead enmeshing itself into the social tensions of Bay Ridge, the desperation of youth, the whiteness of Tony's suit/dreams (perfectly replicated by Raul/Tony and other contestants in the Saturday afternoon Chilean variety show to which the film builds its arc), and the exaltation of dance explored in the film by John Badham (Blue Thunder, War Games). With deadpan brutality diffused everywhere, leaking out of rusted pipes, shining beneath the dance floor, hiding in the hall closet, crawling through the dead grass, the film's horrors get more frightening the farther away from the picture you get. But is the story of a Chilean loser obsessed with New York disco supposed to have a Hollywood ending?

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Turkish Delight

Paul Verhoeven's Turkish Delight (1973) starred Rutger Hauer and Monique Van der Ven as the star-crossed bohemian lovers Eric and Olga, who meet in the Netherlands when Van der Ven stops for the hitch-hiking artist Hauer. Told mostly in flashback, the film explores the charms, whims, and pettiness of new romance, of sexual escapade, of drunken debauchery. Like Keetje Tippel (aka Katie's Passion) (1975), which was set in 19th-century Amsterdam and also starred Hauer and Van der Ven, Turkish Delight seems at first glance like an anacronistic period piece, quite different in form, content, and philosophy from Verhoeven's American films such as RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995). But, even as such, both films demonstrate the same kind of disconnection to reality and the strange transient nature of life and death. Turkish Delight was not only one of Verhoeven's first features, but one of Hauer's as well, made a decade prior to Blade Runner (1982), Nicolas Roeg's Eureka (1983), and Sam Peckinpah's Osterman Weekend (1983). In between this film and those, Hauer starred in the obscure Mysteries (1978), based on a Knut Hamsun novel about a enigmatic stranger, a suicide, a dwarf, and an ill-fated love triangle. Mysteries co-starred Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) and Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey, The Leatherboys). Based on a novel called Turks Fruit by Dutch author and sculptor Jan Hendrik Wolkers (1925-2007), Turkish Delight ended rather melancholically for some tastes, but then again there's not much fun in brain tumors. The dubbed (vhs) versions of both Turkish Delight and Katie Tippel are awful, though the bad sync and cut-rate voiceover artists used in Katie Tippel are kind of funny at the same time.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Once Upon a Time in America

Sergio Leone's swan song, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), was an old man's lament about memory, absence, architecture, and the inevitability of death. Rightly called an epic poem of violence, greed, and betrayal, the film was also a masterpiece of narrative structure in which the ringing of a telephone inside of a Chinatown opium den initiates the (opium-induced) dream-memory-fantasy of "Noodles" Aaronson, the Jewish gangster played by Robert De Niro. The movie begins in the center, travels to the past, fades to the future, and returns/flashbacks to the center again, much as our dream life operates. Like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (and the end of Taxi Driver), this "flashback" ending can be interpreted both as a dream itself and as a return to consciousness at the end of a dream. This film was in many ways Leone's lifetime project, as he had been ready to go into production since the early seventies. The principle cast, as assembled, was superb: James Woods as "Max" Bercowicz (aka Christopher Bailey); Larry Rapp as "Fats" Gelly; Elizabeth McGovern and Jennifer Connelly (pictured above at age 12) as Fats' sister Deborah, both true love and date-rape victim of De Niro. In smaller roles were Tuesday Weld; William Forsyth; Treat Williams; Joe Pesci; Burt Young; Danny Aiello. Marked with fantastic period settings that ranged from turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to the 1930s to 1968, the film was also supported by a tremendous score by Ennio Morricone (as usual). The film's dream-like narrative was centered in mythology, with the anti-hero De Niro returning from exile to New York City, the land of his boyhood. His return to Fats' bar was filled with an almost violent nostalgia, as he quietly surveys the building itself, the feel of the walls, the empty space, the removable plank in the bathroom wall from which he spied (and spies again) on his young love practicing ballet on the empty storeroom stage. The graphic violence, the corruption, and the betrayal seem to fade for De Niro, and Leone, beneath the inability to recover the lost dreams of youth.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Bunny Lake is Missing

Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) masterfully toyed with its audience at MOMA last month with a tale of incest, intrigue, and insanity. Carol Lynley stars as an American single mother, alone in London, whose 4-year-old girl "Bunny" goes missing from elementary school on her first day. No one--including the audience--has seen Bunny, and chief detective Laurence Olivier would at least like a verifiable photograph of the child before prolonging his investigation into a second day. Lynley, a former child model and actress, was perfectly cast as the wide-eyed Ann Lake, her innocent optimism fading into a zoned-out deceitfulness, or so Preminger would have you believe. As usual in a Preminger film, the acting was superb: in addition to Olivier and Lynley, Bunny Lake featured Noel Coward as the alcoholic thespian/landlord with a collection of African masks and S&M relics (De Sade's "skull" and original whip); Martita Hunt as retired school owner Ada Ford whose studies of children's nightmares cannot but help drive the investigation forward; Kier Dullea as Lynley's brother in a performance rivaling Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock's Psycho or Karlheinz Boehm in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (both 1960). The film was adapted from a novel by Evelyn Piper (Merriam Modell) that was recently republished by the CUNY Feminist Press. The wide-screen black & white cinematography by Denys Coop--who had previously shot the brilliant Billy Liar (1963) with Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie--perfectly matched Preminger's sinister pseudo-noir vision that was consistent in his work, whether set in London, New York, or the California coast. Among his finest films are Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Saint Joan (1957). What separates Bunny Lake is Missing from his other work is that it is as subversive as it is suspenseful. Watch for The Zombies in an extended performance on British television performing "Just Out Of Reach" during an important scene in a local pub.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Maitresse

Barbet Schroeder's Maitresse (1976) has retained an "underground" following, which perhaps is all one can expect from an X-rated romantic dark comedy that graphically portrayed professional S&M encounters using real customers, real masks, real chains, real cages, real torture racks, whippings, piercings, nailings. The film also portrayed the nuances of romance, the power struggles in new relationships, the limits of 1960s sexual liberation, and the role of class differences in social movements. Bulle Ogier starred as Ariane, a dominatrix working out of the basement of her bourgeois apartment (actually a separate downstairs apartment that is connected by a hidden mechanical stairway). This is Ogier's finest role, though she is excellent in her other work for Schroeder, including The Vallee (1972), set in the New Guinea rainforest, and the gambling movie Tricheurs (The Cheaters) (1984). She also has the distinction of having worked for Luis Bunuel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and for taking on the Catherine Deneuve role of Severine in the 2006 sequel to Belle de Jour, called Belle Toujours which stars Michel Piccoli in his original role of Husson and was directed by (98 year old) Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. Starring alongside Ogier in Maitresse was Gerard Depardieu as Olivier, a cocksure ex-con who stumbles upon Ogier's dungeon while burglaring her building. Though Ogier attempts to keep her two worlds (and apartments, even with separate phones) separate, the lines between dominantion and submission blur as her relationship with Depardieu grows. He, still somewhat indignant to her lifestyle and her boss Gautier, tries to control her. She, by seducing him into her professional life, tries equally to control him. Neither the film nor these relationship boundaries are predictable or static, and Schroeder's tender "climax" of the film seems to suggest that only in masochistic desire--complete surrender--does true love reside. The film's extraordinary visuals--the domestic Parisian scenes, the dimly lit basement, the great scene at the country manor--were shot by Nestor Almendros, a Schroeder regular who won an Academy Award for Terrence Mallick's Days of Heaven (1979). The costumes were by Karl Lagerfeld. The breadth of Schroeder's work, like Werner Herzog, is both very obsessive and very diverse, directing feature films as well as documentaries such as General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974), Koko: The Talking Gorilla (1978), and The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1987). He was also, famously, an important figure in the French New Wave, producing, among other movies, Eric Rohmer's The Girl at the Monceau Bakery (1963), Nadja a Paris (1964), La Collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud's (1969), Claire's Knee (1970), Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). He later produced Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (with Anna Karina)(1976) and was featured in Pierre Zucca’s infamous Roberte (1979) based on the novel and artwork of Pierre Klossowski, translator and interpreter of De Sade and brother of the painter Balthus.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Tattooed Life

Tattooed Life (aka Irezumi Ichidai) was an existential Yakuza film made by Seijun Suzuki in 1965 for the Nikkatsu Film Corporation during one of Seijun's most prolific and controversial eras. It was preceded by Gates of Flesh (1964) and Story of a Prostitute (1965) and followed by Tokyo Drifter (1966) and the classic Branded to Kill (1967). By the end of the decade he was fired from Nikkatsu and essentially banned from making movies in Japan; his resurfacing in the 1980s pleased many of his loyal fans. Yakuza movies were strictly b-movies and Seijun was like a Japanese Sam Fuller, figuring that as long as his pictures came in on time and under budget anything goes. Yakuza films, of course, also predate other "tattoo" films such as the hallucinatory Illustrated Man with Rod Steiger (1969) (based on a Ray Bradbury short story) and David Cronenberg's Russian mafia movie Eastern Promises (2007) with Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts. Tattooed Life starred Hideki Takahashi as Tetsu the "White Fox" (or "Silver Fox" depending on your translation) and Masako Izumi as Midori who falls in love with the marked man with a secret past. Tetsu and his art-school brother Kenji (Kotobuki Hananomoto) are on the run from a killing (in self defense) and arrive in a port city on the Sea of Japan seeking passage to Manchuria where they can escape the police and the Yakuza family who is chasing them. While working for a small mining company, the brothers meet Midori and her sister Masayo (Hiroko Ito), who happens to be married to the boss of the mining company. The brothers are pursued by a strange man in red shoes, and dodge text-book shady waterfront characters left and right, including the pencil-pushing Ezaki (Yuji Odaka) whose unrequited love for Midori drives him toward jealous revenge. Tetsu, who has raised his younger brother since childhood (their parents died when they were young) warns him that "sometimes there are things you have to give up when you become a man" and "don't get carried away by emotion." Kenji's death, it seems, was fated when he was unable to control his forbidden love for the married Masayo. The film, which features many shots with character's backs to the camera, through open windows, etc., works despite its cardboard characters, sparse dialogue, and see-through plot lines.