Japanese director Hitoshi Yazaki has earned international renown with his delicate movies about lonely girls and young women looking for love. Although his latest melodrama focuses on a married couple, the characters once again mirror the emotional dispossession of modern Japan. The young couple’s outwardly calm union is internally undermined by their aloofness towards each other. Despite sharing breakfast, dinner, a household and a bed, their relationship is devoid of sex and all other physical manifestations of affection – theirs is a relationship based more on the respect of roommates. With time they both enter into love affairs but they stay together, maintaining their marriage with the help of lies. Told in an unostentatious style, the melodrama avoids affected emotions, presenting instead an unobtrusive portrait of a relationship that is admittedly dysfunctional, but which simultaneously has an irreplaceable value for both wife and husband. –Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Hitoshi Yazaki (b. 1956, Kajikazawa, Japan) founded a film club (for shooting short movies) with Shunichi Nagasaki while studying screenwriting at university. In 1979 he and Nagasaki (a pioneer on the independent 8mm scene) founded their own production company, and in 1980 Yazaki completed his feature debut Afternoon Breezes (Kazetachi no gogo), which in Japan became a sensation of non-studio filmmaking, and even made it into foreign distribution. He achieved similar success with March Comes in Like a Lion (Sangatsu no raion, 1991), his first commercial feature. In the new millennium he shot the four-hour drama The Girl Who Picks Flowers and the Girl Who Kills Insects (Hana wo tsumu shôjo to mushi wo korosu shôjo, 2000) and adapted the manga by Kiriko Nananan entitled Strawberry Shortcakes (Sutoroberî shotokeikusu, 2006). —Karlovy Vary IFF
A delicate and precisely constructed drama about marriage and infidelity that recalls some of the finest films Naruse and Bergman made in the same vein. Nakatani Miki and the ubiquitous Ômori Nao are absolutely terrific in their respective roles. One of the great Japanese films of recent years.
