“Zokki,” the introduction on the film’s website tells us, “is impossible to categorize ... Zokki is Zokki.” Fair enough, but all films, by an iron law of reviewing, must have a label and the one that fits best in this case, if crookedly, is “quirky comedy.”
Seeing it at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, I went in expecting “Zokki” to supply belly laughs but left disappointed. Seeing it again, I realized that it was closer in sensibility to the work of celebrated maverick Yoshiharu Tsuge, whose surreal, absurdist manga has inspired several films, including “Nowhere Man” (1991), the directorial debut of actor Naoto Takenaka.
So it’s fitting that, nearly three decades on, Takenaka is one of the directors of “Zokki,” together with fellow actors Takayuki Yamada and Takumi Saitoh. Each member of this trio did his own casting, though they worked from a common script by Yutaka Kuramochi, with its clever repeated motifs and interwoven storylines, based on short stories by manga artist Hiroyuki Ohashi.
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