’Lust In The Rain’: Tokyo Review

Dir: Shinzo Katayama. Japan/Taiwan. 2024. 132mins

Gauche aspiring manga artist Yoshio (Ryo Narita) finds himself inhabiting the occasionally visited third nook of a love triangle that additionally contains Imori (Go Morita), a braggart novelist who’s but to publish something, and slinky divorcee Fukuko (Eriko Nakamura) in Katayama Shinzo’s formidable however uneven epic erotic drama. The surreal prospers depart us in little question that at the very least a number of the image, which was tailored from a narrative by legendary manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge and is about predominantly in Forties northern Japan, is Yoshio’s overheated sexual fantasy. Nevertheless it’s not till a way into the movie that the extent of this turns into clear, and the image grows fairly extra emotionally complicated and attention-grabbing.

The wryly titillating tone segues into one thing darker and extra profoundly sorrowful

The manga supply materials, additionally titled Lust In The Rain, is a late-career work for Tsuge (it was first revealed within the early 80s), an artist whose reputation exploded through the 60s and whose surrealist type and countercultural inclinations have drawn comparisons with Robert Crumb. Like Crumb, Tsuge has a following in comedian e book circles, and a big proportion of the movie’s viewers will probably be drawn from current Tsuge followers. After its Tokyo premiere the movie will display in Tallinn and will serve to lift the profile of director Katayama, who debuted with Siblings Of The Cape (2018) and earned the New Director Award from the Administrators Guild of Japan for his second movie Lacking (2022).

Katayama is actually a director who shouldn’t be afraid to take a probably divisive method. It’s fairly a daring transfer to open a movie with an eroticised rape sequence. And if later revelations (fairly a bit later, it is a image that takes a protracted whereas to get the grist of the story) put a distinct perspective on the occasions of the primary 70 minutes or so, the actual fact stays that it is a movie which is inordinately keen on male-gaze pictures of pert breasts and sweat-glistening feminine sexual ecstasy. 

The opening scene, which provides the movie its title, is straight away revealed to be a fantasy within the thoughts of the socially awkward and sexually pissed off Yoshio, who promptly turns it into his newest Manga. However the marketplace for his work shouldn’t be precisely ravenous, and Yoshio owes hire to his unsavoury landlord Oyaji (Naoto Takenaka). It’s by way of Oyaji that Yoshio first meets Fukuko, when each he and Imori are persuaded by Oyaji to assist her transfer home. When the lads arrive, not solely is Fukuko not packed however she’s having fun with a languorous bare daytime nap – a revelation that sends Yoshio’s libido and sketch pad into overdrive. He’s too gradual in making a transfer nonetheless, and Fukuko and Imori hook up, and, for varied causes, transfer into Yoshio’s cramped condominium shortly afterward.

To offer away the movie’s reveal can be to spoil one of many movie’s extra profitable features. Suffice to say, the hallucinatory qualities of the storytelling begin to gel with the story itself. And the image’s wryly titillating tone segues into one thing darker and extra profoundly sorrowful.

There are questions on tonal inconsistencies and the movie’s depiction of its feminine characters. This actually received’t be for everybody. However there’s technical artistry on present. The soundscape is layered and unnerving. And it appears terrific, with the unmodernised streets of Chiayi Metropolis in central Taiwan doubling for post-war Japan. Its wealthy jewelled color palette is a pleasure to have a look at, and different later scenes are mounted with a visceral depth. What at first looks like an exploitative moist dream turns right into a genuinely unsettling nightmare.