Hiroshi Okuhara
Somewhere on the coast of Taiwan is Hotel Iris, a mouldering seaside establishment run by a cold and thrifty Japanese woman (Nahana) and her lonely half-Taiwanese daughter Mari (Lucia). One night, Mari hears the cries of a woman from the upper floors. Heading up to investigate, she witnesses a distraught woman in a red camisole dress escape an impeccably dressed but violent man (NAGASE Masatoshi) whose cold voice is entrancing. Mari’s initial shock turns into a strange fascination which drives her to follow the man to discover more about him. He is a translator who lives on an isolated island one can only reach by boat and rumours swirl around him and recent murders. The closer she gets to the man, the more a hidden layer of Mari’s personality awakens as she allows herself to be engulfed by his strange passions…
Zhao-ping, a young Chinese artist, lives in an artists’ community near Bejing with his Japanese girlfriend Hana. One day he sees a black square floating in the sky. When the object lands, a bewildered naked man appears from it. He looks Japanese, but he doesn’t know who he is, or where he came from. Zhao-ping takes him under his wing. Is it an alien visitor? Then how is it possible that everyone the stranger meets thinks they know him from somewhere?
Aoi Kuruma (A Blue Automobile) focuses on such a character - a part-time DJ and record-store employee named Richio (Arata). With his spiky yellow hair, wrap-around shades and pale mask of a face, Richio would seem to be an icy moon circling the distant planet of his own regard. But as Okuhara shows us from the first scene, Richio has been traumatized by a boyhood horror - and still bears the physical scars on one eye, the emotional scars in dreams and visions he can neither escape nor explain away. The sunglasses and mask are there for a reason, the pain and rage are real. At the same time, he has a straightforwardness that verges on the cruel - but this is also one of his most appealing qualities.
Kawamoto works and lives in a dilapidated pool hall which also serves as a rehearsal space for him and his friend Chikako. They seem contented to while away their hours doing nothing much at all. Meanwhile, an old pool shark meets some people from his past that he is none too happy to see again. How will this affect their private haven?
The Cossacks have left their beautiful wife and child behind. Every morning, he goes to work, and at night, when he comes home, he finds his wife and child. The man begins to feel that something is different. He can't sleep, he can't laugh, and he has no answers. One day, a woman chased by a suspicious foreigner runs into the cinema where he works. A few days later, by chance, he meets the woman again and decides to accompany her on her "last dangerous job", without knowing what is going on. During the short journey. The man is convinced that she is the answer to his life... The story could be seen as a dream of a Peter Pan man who wants to be a boy forever, but thanks to the characters and good performances of the lead actors, it is successfully made into a physical reality. The result is a bittersweet, "slightly older" boy meets girl story.
A fun picnic for three, we thought it would last forever. Two brothers, both aspiring to become professional musicians, live a carefree life. A young woman moves into the flat next door to theirs. Soon the three hit it off and she begins to sing in the brothers' band. But just when they are all feeling a little emotional, the brother goes off on his own. The film is richly unified and full of taste, from the characters' clothes to the sweets beside them, the locations and the books they find. Maybe it's just a hobby of the director, but when it appears on the screen it becomes something that can be called aesthetically pleasing, and we feel the emergence of a filmmaker with an extravagant sensibility. The seemingly trivial dialogue also captures the emotional landscape of a generation that does not speak its mind.
