This is Japanese New Wave - how cool. I'm not sure I've seen Japanese New Wave before. Maybe some later Kurosawa? Like that dream movie?
This was good and bad for me. The good was the sets and setup of the movie. It starts with people working on the set of a Japanese puppet play and discussing how difficult it is to translate the suicide in the plot to a play. Then the puppets are gone and we have live actors in their place. This is seamlessly done and not jarring in any way. However, the sets are are still set up for the play - not a movie. Therefore, we see set changes. These are done by a type of narrator - men in black with shrouded faces. These guys change the sets, watch the action, and even freeze the actors. It's cool. IMDB says that they're the puppet masters. That makes sense, and it's great.
The bad to me was the plot. This is the most incredible sob story of all time, and not my type of thing. But please remember it's an old play. Think of a Shakespearean tragedy (also not my thing). A married man - a merchant - with two young children falls in love with a courtesan (a prostitute, which is an ok profession in Japan). They are very much in love, but he cannot afford to buy her out of servitude. He and the prostitute agree to kill themselves together rather than be apart. That is established in the beginning of the movie, and then there is two hours of crying and wailing and protestations of love and forgiveness. And oral sex. I was not expecting that! Interesting.
All big movie fans should watch this one. Masahiro Shinoda directed, and he is skilled.
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