Droll Japanese film about a small-town sawbones who, in the last days of the Second World War, wages a single-track battle against the spread of hepatitis (earning him the alias of "Dr. Liver") while the army medicos are overly concerned with typhus. The unprepossessing hero cuts an amusing figure, bustling through the streets with his black bag and white straw hat (to the swinging beat of a somewhat anachronistic jazz ensemble in the background). But much of the best entertainment comes from his young housekeeper whom he is attempting to wean from prostitution. (Good reason why: the kinky episode involving a hard-boiled egg, a lampshade, and a Leica camera.) The movie is a hair or two overlong, but is at all points highly individual, often oblique in its approach and oddish in its shape. (The opening is quite literally up in the clouds, with cartooned puffs of anti-aircraft fire blossoming beneath the wings of U.S. reconnaissance planes.) And it contains some unforgettable moments. One such is the touching and discreet and then boldly lyrical scene of the simultaneous arrivals of a letter from the doctor's son on the Manchurian front and a telegram from the war department telling of his death (the ripped-up pieces of the telegram multiply into a blanketing confetti storm). Another is the unexpectedly exciting finale juxtaposing a blue whale and a nuclear mushroom cloud, which looks to the monomaniacal doctor less like a mushroom than like a hypertrophied liver. With Akira Emoto and Kumiko Aso; directed by Shohei Imamura. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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