Elegant Beast

Yuzo Kawashima's 1962 Japanese film takes place in a single apartment. The family knows their son has embezzled money and is trying to cover it up while continuing their own arrangements. The idea is that nobody is innocent. Every visitor to the flat brings another fraud and the family has to deal with it; in the end they meet someone more capable than themselves. The flat is the only setting and the camera moves constantly; Kawashima divides the frame through doorways and stairs. Ayako Wakao is in the cast. Moral dissolution in postwar Japan is the film's open subject. Who it's for: those who like classic Japanese cinema and formally inventive work. Who it's not for: viewers expecting sympathetic characters; nobody in the film is defensible.