Company employee Hiroko leads a mousy single life. She wears no make-up, and doesn't care about other people, until the day a face- and limbless male "torso" comes into her life... Yamazaki Yutaka, an experienced documentary cameraman and longtime cinematographer for Koreeda Hirokazu, got the inspiration for his first effort as a director from a torso he saw 35 years ago at a sex shop in Copenhagen. Thanks to his sensitive camera work, the movie based on Yamazaki's own script exudes the humid and sweaty air of summer in a Japanese city, while the dialogues between Hiroko (Watanabe Makiko) and her sister-uterine (Ando Sakura) come across pleasantly refreshing. I'm already looking forward to the next work of this 70-year-old "newbie" movie director!

By Maru July 15, 2010