Inju

D

Directed by Barbet Schroeder

What the heck has happened to Barbet Schroeder? It's hard to believe the same director who gave us "Koko" and "Reversal of Fortune" is responsible for this lazy and uninspired stinker.

Benoît Maginal stars as Alex Fayard, a french academic and author who is the world's foremost expert on a reclusive, mysterious Japanese author named Shundei Oe who, despite selling millions of copies of his novels, has never been seen in public. Fayard takes off for Kyoto to promote his newest book but is immediately drawn into a web of deceit and manipulation with Oe at its center. The twists pile up (like a heap of dung, I must say) as Fayard loses himself in Oe's sordid world.

Schroeder's film is really an A to Z essay in failure. From bad acting to credibility gaps the size of the Grand Canyon in Jean Armand Bougrelle's script, there's plenty of blame to go around for this mess. The film is poorly paced and poorly plotted as well, its flacidness punctuated here and there by odd detours into seemingly random sado-mosochistic behavior by its characters. The Japanese actors, bless their hearts, are made to recite an uncomfortably large amount of french dialogue that was obviously memorized word for word beforehand, leading to the odd but often seen phenomenon of characters who have flawless grammar but unbelievably thick accents in a foreign language. Maginal, a talented actor in his own right, seems to have convinced himself of the nobility of his efforts and really does give it a go, but his earnestness clashes violently with the flat delivery of co-stars Lika Minamota and Shinpei Asanuma. The film's cinematography saves it from complete ignominity, as it mercilessly bestows an air of subdued class to an otherwise risible affair.