Survive Style 5+

Eastern Eye

R4 DVD

Japanese with English subtitles

At the end of this film I was left feeling a bit stunned. I had just used up 115 minutes of my life and I still had no idea what I had been watching. It’s not really a drama because it is too incoherent. It’s certainly not a love story although one of the characters has realised how deeply he loved his girlfriend after he has killed her six times. Every time he buries her body in the forest, but when he gets home she is waiting for him, getting angrier each time. There are a number of groups wandering through the story with bits of their being life revealed but even at the end of the film they don’t all come together. I watched it right through, though, because it really is very funny in a tragic sort of way.

We have Vinnie Jones, visiting English hitman for hire, who seems obsessed with what people see as their reason for living. If you give him an unsatisfactory answer or cannot give a reason, he can arrange for you to stop living. There is the group of teenage housebreakers discovering that they are NOT homosexuals, but are just gay. The respected Japanese businessman Mr Kobayashi who now thinks he is a bird when the hypnotist was murdered halfway through his act – can he really learn to fly? The homicidal young female advertising executive who refuses to design the commercials her customers want and instead substitutes her own twisted sort of humour. She is the one who had her hypnotist boyfriend murdered. How do you tie all these together?

You can’t. In the end you just sit back and enjoy each little act as it happens. Many of the characters are caricatures and there is a certain cartoon feel about the whole film. It’s the sort of film that could only be made in Japan - in any other country they would dismiss it as a piece of nonsense. Yet there is fine acting, bizarre plot elements and a quite inoffensive approach to antisocial acts like murder. I’m still not really sure what I watched but I enjoyed it immensely.

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