Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl

Samehada steals money from the gang and runs. Toshiko has run away from home to escape her uncle. The two meet at a mountain guesthouse and set off together. The gang is behind them, and the man running it sends a series of extremely odd hired killers to find them. Katsuhito Ishii directs in his first film, from Minetaro Mochizuki's manga. Tadanobu Asano plays Samehada. What interests the film is style rather than plot. Composition, colour and music stand in front of the narrative; the scenes are built less like an action film than like objects of design. Ishii came from advertising and graphic design and it shows: the frames are symmetrical, the colours saturated, and every scene has a visual idea of its own. The hired killers are the comic source; each is defined by a single oddity and none of them can do the job. The film belongs to the genre games of late nineties Japanese independent cinema, the local counterpart of the post Tarantino dismantling of the crime film. Tadanobu Asano was newly known at the time and this is among the frequently cited works of his career. Who it is for: viewers who like style driven Japanese independent film and genre parody. Who it is not for: the narrative is scattered, the characters are thin, and the humour plays a very particular vein.