Undo

One day Moemi begins tying things. First books, then objects, then everything in the house is wrapped in string. Yukio, her boyfriend, is a writer; he does not understand what is happening and they go to a doctor. There is a diagnosis: obsessive binding. Moemi does not stop and the number of tied things grows. Yukio can do nothing but watch. Shunji Iwai writes and directs. Tomoko Yamaguchi plays Moemi and Toshio Toyoda plays Yukio. It runs about forty five minutes; it is a medium length film made for television. The language rests on the image. Iwai uses an overexposed, whitened picture and the camera is constantly moving; the style continued in his later films and became recognisable in Japanese cinema of the nineties. The subject is the wish to bind. The compulsion is presented as an illness and the film leaves it as something about the relationship itself; the loosening of the bond between two people and the metaphor of the string coincide directly. The narrative explains nothing and gives no cause; the illness stands not as an event but as a state. Iwai became known after this with Love Letter, and this early work counts as the first clear instance of his style. Who it is for: viewers who like Shunji Iwai and films built on visual style. Who it is not for: it is very short, the narrative explains nothing, and the repeated images are tiring for some.