Viewed on DVD. Restoration = five (5) stars; subtitles = four (4) stars. Director Masahiro Shinoda's inventive and dramatic use of a layered presentation technique where a play about making a movie is the movie, sort of. It is a tale of a philandering husband confronting a mid life crisis during Japan's feudal age (a mashup of the usual Shomin-Geki (house drama) and Jidai-Geki (period drama) photo play genres) culminating in the "traditional" lovers' joint murder/suicide . The clever use of helpful and ever-present "stage hands" dressed top-to-toe in black (like those who move things about in the dark between scenes of a stage play) is both menacing and fascinating (they even turn up in the on-location exterior death scenes). Puppets appear in the opening scenes without explanation and then are gone forever without explanation (there is derivative reason for this, but it is missing from the movie). An abstract Torii (a Shinto shrine archway) is used for assisted suicide (or is it willful execution?) with the help of many stage hands (the Director seems to be editorializing here). At about mid point, the movie turns seriously boring from the cumulative impact of nonstop, over-the-top acting histrionics, script repetitions, and scenes of talking heads (the film has been overly stretched and could be cut roughly in half). Cinematography (narrow screen, black and white) is okay (this antiquated format seems to have been used to appeal to art-house theater patrons of the day). Restoration is fine. Score is close to being acoustically invisible. Subtitles are all but missing from the opening credits. They also need some judicious re-editing given the screen flash rate and their accuracy (hey, it's not easy to find translators with Kansai-Ben skills who will work cheap!). Mostly a case of art for art's sake. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.
Review of Double Suicide
