The first Japanese filmmakers, like first filmmakers almost everywhere, thought of their new medium as an extension of still photography: a way of recording reality. Thus the early films of kabuki plays, in which the camera was planted squarely in front of the stage and left there, with pauses only to change reels. Whatever the quality of the play or performances, the result was a filmed experience of stupendous tedium.

In the years since, filmmakers have used various cinematic tricks to "open up" their films of plays, taking them beyond the proscenium arch to the world beyond. Relatively few, however, have gone in the opposite direction -- "closing down" their films to the equivalent of the one-set, one-act play. Movies are supposed to move, aren't they? And how much movement can you get from two characters shut in a room?

Veteran director Yukihiko Tsutsumi tries to answer that question in "Chinese Dinner," a film that, in the program notes, he frankly acknowledges as an "experiment" born of frustration with grinding out an endless succession of TV commercials and TV dramas, interspersed with the occasional feature assignment ("Kindaiichi Shonen Jikenbo," "Keizoku," "Oboreru Sakana").