2/Duo

Kei is an actor who cannot find work; Yu is a junior sales assistant at an expensive clothing shop. The film follows their relationship coming slowly apart, with no crisis and no single betrayal, only two people growing strange to each other in the same flat. Nobuhiro Suwa wrote a script and then asked his actors to forget it once they had read it and to find their own lines. During the shoot he also stopped periodically to interview the two of them in character about what they were feeling. The result stands between documentary and fiction, with scenes that cool in real time. Hidetoshi Nishijima and Eri Yu play the couple. Released in 1997, this was the film that made Suwa’s name outside Japan.