Kagero-za

Japan in the twenties. The playwright Matsuzaki meets a woman in the street. She behaves strangely and disappears. Then she appears again. He follows her and enters a series of encounters: people said to be dead, two women with the same face, a wealthy man who invites him somewhere. Where he is and what is real grow steadily less certain. Seijun Suzuki directs. The source is a text by Kyoka Izumi. It is the second of Suzuki's Taisho trilogy. The three films are set in Japan in the twenties and all of them deliberately erase the line between the real and the imagined. After he was dismissed from the studio Suzuki could not make films for about ten years; this trilogy is his return as an independent and his formally freest work. The design is close to theatre: curtains, painted backdrops, abrupt changes of colour and spaces built like stages. The narrative offers no straight plot; the scenes are joined by association rather than by a chain of logic, and the film does not explain it. The Taisho period was a brief cultural opening in Japan, and the trilogy uses the uncertainty of that time as form. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental Japanese cinema and formal games. Who it is not for: the narrative cannot be followed, it is long, and the film explains nothing anywhere.