The source material is a story by Haruki Murakami, and its transition to the screen does not look to have been an easy one, never shaking loose from the omniscient third-person narrator. (At times the characters themselves will fill in the narrator's thoughts as if they were dialogue, a curious effect.) Unrolling almost in the form of a panorama, with the camera gliding left to right from one scene to the next, it tells of a man who is first attracted to a woman by her clothes ("She wore her clothes naturally," the narrator expounds, "as though enveloped by a special breeze"), then repulsed by her spendthrift obsession with them after their marriage, then left with a cavernous closetful of them after her death. The idea, teased out to a long, slow hour and a quarter, has a certain parable-like potency, but not enough to fight through the oatmeal-gray image (unflattering to the clothes), the monotonous musing piano, and the insistent wistful narrator. With Issei Ogata and Rie Miyazawa; written and directed by Jun Ichikawa. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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