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Warning: This might not make too much sense. Shinako (Michiyo Ookusu)
asks Shunko (Yusako Matsuda), a random stranger, so accompany her to the
hospital to visit a friend, as she doesn't dare to go alone because of an
old woman selling bladder cherries in the hospital's lobby who actually
collects women's souls - in the form of bladder cherries. Shunko refuses,
but somehow falls in love with Shinako. Shunko pays a visit to his old,
wealthy friend Tamawaki (Katsuo Nakamura). On the way there, he meets Ine
(Eriko Kusuda), who bears a striking resemblance to Shinako, but who turns
out to be Tamawaki's wife. Later he learns that Ine has died hours before
he met her. That though doesn't keep her from appearing time and again. Shunko
receives a letter from Tamawaki's other wife to commit suicide together.
He accepts and only later finds out the other wife is actually Shinako.
When the two are about to kill themselves, with Tamawaki in attendance,
Shunko chickens out though. Shinako has still fallen in love with him
though, but instead of accepting her advances, he starts an affair with
Ine - who might be nothing but another manifestation of Shinako. Shunko
meets with anarchist puppet maker Heart and tries to get him to help him
figure out what's going on, but then Heart might just be another
manifestation of himself and thus just as clueless. A performance of a
kids' theatre group promises to shed some light on the muddled mystery,
but before the final act is done, the theatre collapses. Shunko decides to
commit suicide with Shinako after all, and the two drown themselves in a
barrel ... but in the end, it turns out that it wasn't Shunko who drowned
himself with Shinako but Tamawaki. Shunko is left alive to progress into a
brighter future with Ine ... but wait a minute, isn't she dead? If
you think my synopsis of Kagero-za sounds confusing, then it
actually is a perfect representation of the film - on a purely narrative
level. In Kagero-za, time as a linear dimension has little value,
several things that are talked about in the past tense only happen in the
future, other things might or might not happen, and even an absolute thing
like death becomes nothing but a fleeting dimension here. But while the film's plot refuses to make much sense
objectively, it makes perfect sense in the context of the movie, which is
basically a tragic romance told according to the logic of a nightmare. The
wonderful thing here though is director Seijun Suzuki's very subtle
approach to his material, turning this neither into an effects spectacle
(which the ghost story aspects of the plot would have suggested) nor a
brainheavy arthouse film, but an amazingly entertaining and down-to-earth
piece of absurd, even surreal cinema. Highly recommended.
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