Italian Premiere | In Competition
Japan, 2024, 132’, Japanese
Directed by: Katayama Shinzo
Screenplay: Katayama Shinzo
Cinematography (color): Ikeda Nsoya
Editing: Kataoka Kazuki
Art Direction: Isoyama Sayaka
Music: Takai Hiyoko
Executive Producers: Aida Satoshi, Nakanishi Kazuo
Cast: Xing Li, Morita Go, Nakamura Eriko, Narita Ryo, Takenaka Naoto
Date of First Release in Territory: November 29th, 2024
The phenomenon of life review in the face of imminent death is well known, if resistant to scientific explanation: How do you conduct experiments on falling mountain climbers or expiring ER patients?
Something similar occurs in Katayama Shinzo’s Lust in the Rain when soldier-protagonist Yoshio (Narita Ryo) is shot in wartime China and sees his past flash by like a surreal highlight reel.
But this phantasmagoric romantic drama, which is based on four stories by manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu, so thoroughly obliterates the divide between past and present, waking and dreaming (or hallucinating) that defining Yoshio’s baseline reality becomes hard – and pointless. Yoshio tells his free-spirited lover Fukuko (Nakamura Eriko) that she “goes with the flow”: It’s good advice for enjoying this meandering, mesmerizing movie.
Although Tsuge’s work is reflected in the film’s melancholy, introspective mood, Katayama and his collaborators charge up the visuals with everything from green and red lighting that evokes an erotic fantasy world to night shots of an illuminated white castle that looks like the lair of a Bond villain.
The story begins with a dream sequence taken from a Tsuge story that gives the film its title. At a countryside bus stop, a man (Narita) talks a strange woman into stripping in the midst of a driving rainstorm – the metal on her clothes will attract lightning, he tells her – and proceeds to rape her.
This disturbing scene abruptly shifts to an idyllic shot of the pair naked in front of a spectacular waterfall. Then the dreamer, Yoshio, awakes in early postwar Japan. The film later reenters his erotically charged dreamworld, if not with the same jarring impact as the first visit. A struggling manga artist, Yoshio encounters a newly widowed Fukuko while helping his cranky old landlord (Takenaka Naoto) move her out of her house.
He is attracted to this casually seductive woman, but soon learns she already has another man, a cagey would-be novelist named Imori (Morita Go) who ropes Yoshio into a dubious sales scheme. When the scheme falls through, Yoshio puts the now desperate couple up in his tiny apartment and spies on them as they make noisy love.
These opening scenes play like dark comedy and suggest why Tsuge is often compared to American comic artist Robert Crumb, who similarly mixes sex and twisted humor with an uninhibited imagination.
But the story takes us through more mind-bending changes with the same cast of main characters in different guises. In one narrative arc, Yoshio is a wounded soldier who is in love with Fukuko, now a sex worker in a military brothel, while Imori has morphed into a solicitous comrade and the landlord into a gruff army surgeon.
The temptation is to say, as we do when Dorothy wakes up after her trip to Oz, that the protagonist is simply dreaming a possible future, but Yoshio’s journey through time and psychic states defies past explanations. Instead of The Wizard of Oz, Katayama seems more influenced by Mulholland Drive, the David Lynch masterpiece that undermines assumptions about not only what we are seeing on screen, but also reality itself.
In the boldness and scale of its vision, Lust in the Rain stands out from the crowd of cautious, small-minded local movies. To paraphrase William Blake: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom – and one baffling, stunning film.
Katayama Shinzo
Born in Osaka in 1981, Katayama Shinzo went to Tokyo after high school graduation to attend a film school founded by director Nakamura Genji. Starting in 2004 he worked as an assistant director, including stints with Bong Joon Ho on the 2008 short Tokyo! and the 2009 feature Mother. His 2018 feature debut Siblings of the Cape and his 2021 thriller Missing were both based on true incidents. Katayama also directed the six-episode crime drama The Hovering Blade for the Wowow entertainment channel. His latest film, the 2024 Lust in the Rain, is a Japan-Taiwan co-production based on the work of manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
2018 – Siblings of the Cape
2021 – Missing
2024 – Lust in the Rain