A Stranger of Mine

On a Friday evening a perfectly ordinary office worker named Miyata is called out to a restaurant by a friend. Sitting in the same restaurant is a woman who has broken with her fiancé and walked out of her home. The two get talking and the night runs long. But there were other people in that same place that evening, and the story each of them tells does not quite match the next. Kenji Uchida's first feature shows the same night several times over, each time through somebody else's eyes. What looks like coincidence on the first pass turns out to have been arranged on the second. The film was made on a low budget and drew attention within independent Japanese cinema. The tone moves between comedy and crime, and it keeps the solution for the end.