MONDAY

Sabu, an actor who turned director in 1996 with D.A.N.G.A.N. Runner is a stand-out for both his name, with its reference to the Indian star of those old Hollywood jungle epics, and his chase scenes. Sabu designs them much the way Buster Keaton did, with hilarious ingenuity and blithe indifference to the laws of probability. In his fourth film, Monday, Sabu finally gives the chase a rest, while retaining his distinctive storytelling style and thematic concerns. This a tale of a salaryman's disastrous weekend also happens to be all-fours-in-the-air funny. Sabu regular Shinichi Tsutsumi (Postman Blues, Unlucky Monkey) stars as Takagi, a salaryman who wakes up one Monday in a hotel bedroom with no memory of where his weekend went. Then he discovers a packet of the purification salts given to mourners at funerals - and the fog lifts. He remembers being at the wake of a colleague - and being responsible for the gruesomely hilarious way it ended. The rest of the film segues between the past and the present, as Takagi recovers more pieces of his lost weekend. As his past actions, from the idiotic to the deadly, begin to impinge on his increasingly desperate present, the film moves toward its explosive, absurd finale. Sabu has used similar comic elements before, but in Monday they click into place with a new precision and effectiveness. Also, while abandoning the comforts of Japanese movie stereotypes, the film rejects the "zero to hero" formula of Hollywood. There is something admirable in Takagi's emergence from corporate mouse to outlaw lion, roaring his defiance at the guardians of the law sent to squelch him, but there is also something ridiculous. He remains, to the bang-up end, an idiot avatar for a new age.