Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees

A bandit living in the mountains kills travellers and takes their belongings. One day he keeps the wife of a man he has killed. She is beautiful and unafraid, and begins giving him orders. First she has his other wives on the mountain killed, then she wants to go down to the city. In Kyoto a new demand appears: she wants severed heads, and every night he kills someone and brings one back. Masahiro Shinoda directs. The source is a story by Ango Sakaguchi. The image at the centre is the cherry tree. In Japanese culture the blossom stands for beauty and transience; Sakaguchi inverts it and builds the ground beneath a flowering tree as a place to fear. The subject is the limitlessness of desire. The woman never stops and the bandit meets every demand; the film does not present it as a love story. Shinoda belongs to the Japanese new wave and his visual style is deliberately artificial; the colour, costume and settings are not realistic. The violence is explicit and everyday; the severed heads are shown not as horror but as objects. Who the woman is is never explained and the film leaves it deliberately empty. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies Japanese cinema and dark fables. Who it is not for: the violence is heavy, the narrative rests on a metaphor, and there is no bond with the characters.