The sobering film tracks the fall of Rika Umezawa (Rie Miyazawa), a married bank employee in her thirties who begins embezzling from her elderly clients in order to splurge on her younger, college-dropout boyfriend. His newest, Pale Moon, fully departs from this approach with its adaptation of a Mitsuyo Kakuta novel. While the roots of their feuds are peculiar and extreme-incest, dire debt, and prostitution-Sumika and Kyomi’s tumultuous relationship is the backbone of the story, and their bickering often reveals uncomfortable emotional truths about how sisters treat each other.ĭaihachi has since demonstrated his talent for seamlessly moving between the wildly fanciful and the painfully real by adapting novels and manga like Kuhio Taisa (09), Permanent Nobara (10), and The Kirishima Thing (12). In Funuke, the children of a couple who die while attempting to rescue a cat are forced to live under the same roof for the first time in years: dorky little sister Kyomi, an aspiring manga artist sexy, psychotic older sister Sumika, an aspiring, talentless actress half-brother Shinji, and his cheerful, long-suffering wife Machiko. Premiering in Critics’ Week at Cannes, the 2007 film immediately put Yoshida on the map as a masterful practitioner of weird, dark comedy, after a start making TV commercials.

One such comedy was Daihachi Yoshida’s debut feature, Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!. While J-horror would become an international phenomenon, feeding a cycle of Hollywood remakes (to say nothing of the wholesale stylistic pilfering that went on), only a handful of wacky Japanese comedies expanded to art-house audiences, because, well, that’s just the nature of their niche appeal. In the late Nineties and early Aughts, two genres of Japanese film rose to prominence within Western cult-movie circles, thanks in large part to the Internet and DVDs: J-horror ( The Ring, Pulse, Dark Water) and outlandish, absurd comedies ( Welcome Back, Mr.

Pale moon gang