Japan,
2003, 107 min
Shown in 2004
CREDITS
- dir
-
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
- prod
-
Atsushi Sato, Atsuyuki Shimoda, Motoo Kawabata
- scr
-
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ken Furusawa
- cam
-
Noriyuki Mizuguchi
- editor
-
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
- mus
-
Hiromichi Kaori
- cast
-
Koji Yakusho, Hiromi Nagasaku, Santamaria Yusuke, Akira Emoto
- source
-
WORLD SALES Mirovision, Inc, 1-151 Shinmunro 2-Ga, Chongro Gu, 110-062 Seoul, South Korea. FAX: 82-2-737-1184. EMAIL: jamie@mirovision.com.
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Kiyoshi Kurosawa in person.
OTHER
With Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterful Pulse, the director—as well as the new Japanese horror movement that he’d helped to establish with earlier works like Sweet Home and Cure—seemed to hit a high-water mark. Where to go after striking a perfect balance between the frightening and philosophical? Doppelganger uses the classic supernatural theme of the double, à la Edgar Allan Poe, to generate harrowing amounts of dread and tension. But it’s also a surprisingly funny and heartfelt work, held together by a dazzling dual role by Koji Yakusho, longtime Kurosawa collaborator and the star of Shall We Dance? (SFIFF 1997). Yakusho plays Michio Hayasaki, a medical researcher cracking under the stress of working on his latest invention: an “artificial human body chair.” This already troubled project is thrown into total chaos by the inexplicable arrival of Hayasaki’s unruly, unscrupulous darker half. A web of sabotage, murder and general misbehavior soon ensues. All the while, Kurosawa maintains his unique cinematic space, somewhere between Andrei Tarkovsky and Tobe Hooper, although Doppelganger adds psychological slapstick, reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman’s script for Adaptation, to the mix. The result is a uniquely eccentric twist in Kurosawa’s ongoing strategy to push the stuff of genre beyond itself.
—Patrick Macias
FACTOID #384
Henry Fonda attended the SFIFF in 1967 to receive a tribute for his work in classics like The Grapes of Wrath and 12 Angry Men. Daughter Jane showed up in 1975 for a tribute of her own. And her brother Peter made two Festival appearances, one as a guest in 1963 and another to accompany the film Nadja (in which he gleefully portrayed Dr. Van Helsing) in 1995.
