Omnibus films must have a unifying theme, however loose or gimmicky; otherwise, they're a collection of shorts. And while there's nothing wrong with shorts as such, when packaged as a feature film, they are, as all distributors know, box-office suicide.
"Kamifusen" ("Paper Balloon"), an omnibus distributed by Tokyo University of the Arts and directed by four of its students, is based on the work of Kunio Kishida (1890-1954), a dramatist and author who studied in France in the 1920s and founded the Bungei-za theater troupe in 1937 after returning to Japan.
The four directors of "Kamifusen" don't entirely avoid staginess — or staleness for that matter — in filming Kishida's eight-decade-old stories. But they also show why Kishida's work, with its focus on relationships between the sexes in all their power and difficulty, passion and fragility, still matters.