Kanzen-naru shiiku: Onna rihatsushi no koi

The excellent camera work & style of "Amazing Story" (English title) makes this film an aesthetic pleasure. It is not only a quiet film about desire and loneliness for the typical art-house audience. But the tension created by crisp pictures of the snow-covered landscape and the clearcut Japanese architecture in a small village where nothing happens is broken by small comic-reliefs, nearly slap-stick interludes, about which all the people in the Hamburg audience could laugh by heart. It is not so much the story-outline which was interesting to me: A young man discovers the long lost love of his life in a small town and kidnaps her to free her from her gambling husband and to start a romance. This sounds rather queer. But it is how the story is revealed which makes the film so charming. Many films of this style often create curiosity by showing us main characters we cannot understand psychologically. We definitely cannot understand the young man who kidnaps the woman. But the film goes beyond this strangeness. The more we get to know these people, the more we understand their behaviour. The woman clearly says to her kidnapper "You are crazy. You're insane." Yet she gives herself away to him - if only for a short, rather dreamlike, time in her life. And for a very short, rather dreamlike, time in our lives -at the cinema - we can get an insight into their hearts.

This film contrasts solitude with desire.

The solitude is beautifully captured in pictures of a nondescript provincial area of northern Japan, including a house for sale that becomes the set piece for most of the film.

The desire is first told by the story, then shown[1], then worked towards the conclusion.

The story works well, but has some incongruities (it is least believable when seen from the woman's point of view, but on the other hand, this criticism can be leveled against roughly 90% of all films).

The casting made a lot of sense, the acting is good, but not perfect.

I enjoyed the film and still like it the day after.

[1] by not overly explicit sex