I Will Buy You

A Japanese film set in the world of baseball. Kishimoto scouts for a club. His job is to find young talent and get them to sign, and to do whatever that takes. His target is a university player named Kurita. The boy is very good and several clubs are after him at once. Kishimoto works not on the player first but on the people around him: his coach, his family, his fiancée and the man who has supported him for years. He bargains with each separately and makes each a separate promise. Those people have their own arithmetic. They want back what they spent on the player, and the boy's future is discussed as an investment. What the film is interested in is not sport but a person turning into something bought and sold, and everyone treating that as normal. Kurita himself barely speaks through all this bargaining. Nobody is entirely honest in the narrative and the film offers no hero. Keiji Sada plays Kishimoto and Keiko Kishi the fiancée. Masaki Kobayashi directed. It is among his early films dealing with institutional corruption. An interesting production for anyone who likes Japanese cinema and cold social criticism. For a viewer expecting a sports film, the narrative takes place in offices and hotel rooms rather than on the field.