When I first saw a trailer for Shunya Ito's "Hajimari mo Owari mo Nai (No Beginning, No End)," an all-but dialogue-free film starring dancer/actor Min Tanaka, I thought it might be a 95-minute performance piece — and thus better reviewed by a dance critic than by me.
But on watching the entire film, I not only changed my mind, but had a sort of back-to-the-basics reawakening. Ito, a veteran director perhaps best known abroad for his 1970s "Sasori" exploitation films, and Tanaka, a 68-year-old who trained in ballet, modern dance and butoh, have stripped away most of the elements we associate with films of feature length, beginning with the pretense of realism, and plunged headlong into the right-brained world of mysticism, poetry and dream.
There is not much of what is commonly thought of as dance, from Mikhail Baryshnikov to Michael Jackson, in the film. Instead, Tanaka and his fellow performers move in ways agonized and stylized, but somehow familiar, calling up images of everything from crawling lizards and ambulant zombies to performance artists on YouTube and Jesus bearing his cross on the Via Dolorosa.
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