Dancing days: Miki Nakatani plays a schoolteacher who falls from grace
10 April 2012
Tetsuya Nakashima, who made the excellent Kamikaze Girls (now showing), tells the tale of Shou (Eita), a feckless young man who finds the body of a female tramp in a park and embarks on a journey to investigate her life.
The old woman turns out to have been a teacher called Matsuko, who fell from grace into prostitution. Miki Nakatani is good as Matsuko as Nakashima blazes retrospectively through the decades from the Fifties to the Eighties with stunning visuals and strange musical set pieces. Somehow it all makes sense, even if a lesser director might well have botched it.
Memories of Matsuko
Cinemas across London
