Pale Moon

Rika is a contract employee at a bank whose job takes her into clients' homes. Her marriage is quiet and inert. At one client's house she meets Kota, a university student, begins an affair, and then starts taking money out of her clients' accounts: small amounts first, then without stopping. As what she buys herself and what Kota owes both grow, the distance between real money and paper disappears. Daihachi Yoshida adapted Mitsuyo Kakuta's novel. The film draws Rika as neither criminal nor victim and asks instead what she was actually trying to buy. Rie Miyazawa's performance swept the best actress awards in Japan. That it is set in the nineties, at the end of the bubble, is not incidental.