In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

AKA 愛のコリーダ 完全ノーカット版 / Ai no Korīda

Director:
Nagisa Ôshima

Writer:
Nagisa Ôshima

In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe (Matsuda) is a former prostitute who works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner, Kichizo Ishida, molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments, drinking, and various other indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife and family to pursue his affair with Abe. Abe becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where Ishida finds he is most excited by being strangled during lovemaking, and he is killed in this fashion. Abe then severs his penis and writes "Sada Kichi the two of us forever" in blood on his chest.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074102/

Floating Weeds (1959)

AKA Ukigusa

Director:
Yasujirô Ozu

Writers:
Kôgo Noda
Yasujirô Ozu

The film takes place during a hot summer in 1958 at a seaside town in the Inland Sea. A troupe of travelling theatre arrives by ship, headed by the troupe's lead actor and owner, Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura). The rest of the troupe goes around the town to promote their kabuki acts.

Komajuro visits his former mistress, Oyoshi, who runs a small eatery in the town. They have a grown-up son Kiyoshi, who now works at the post office as a mail clerk and is saving up to go to the university. However, he does not know who Komajuro is, thinking he is his uncle. Komajuro invites Kiyoshi to go fishing in the sea.

When Sumiko, the lead actress of the troupe and Komajuro's current mistress, learns that Komajuro is visiting his former mistress, she becomes jealous and makes a visit to Oyoshi's eatery, where Kiyoshi and Komajuro are playing a game of go. Komajuro chases her away before she can say anything destructive, then confronts her in the pouring rain. He tells her to get off her back from her son, and decides to break up with her. Sumiko calls Komajuro an ingrate, and cites examples when she has helped him out in the past.

Backstage one day, Sumiko offers Kayo, a pretty young actress from the same troupe, some money and asks her to seduce Kiyoshi. Although Kayo at first refuses, she gives in after Sumiko's insistence. She goes to Kiyoshi's post office to make him fall for her. However, after knowing Kiyoshi for some time, she falls for him and decides to tell Kiyoshi the truth. Kiyoshi says it does not matter how it all starts. The two then engage in a relationship which only later is found out by Komajuro.

Komajuro confronts Kayo, who tells him of Sumiko's setup, but only after asserting she now loves Kiyoshi and is not doing it for money. Komajuro has a violent confrontation with Sumiko, and refuses to listen to her plea for a reconciliation.

The manager of the troupe has absconded, and business is bad. Komajuro has no choice but to disband the troupe, and they have a last night together. Komajuro then goes to Oyoshi's place and tells her of his troupe's break-up. Oyoshi persuades him to tell Kiyoshi the truth about his parenthood and then stay together her place as a family. Komajuro agrees. When Kiyoshi later comes back with Kayo, Komajuro becomes so enraged to see them together that he beats both of them repeatedly, leading to a physical tussle between Kiyoshi and him. Oyoshi is forced to reveal to him the truth about his birth there, but Kiyoshi refuses to accept it and goes to his room upstairs. Taking in Kiyoshi's reaction, Komajuro decides to leave after all. Kayo wants to join him, but Komajuro asks her to stay to help Kiyoshi out. Kiyoshi later has a change of heart and goes downstairs to look for Komajuro, but his father has already left.

At the train station, Komajuro tries to light a cigarette but has no matches. Sumiko, who is sitting nearby, comes up and offers him a light. Sumiko asks where Komajuro is going, since she has now no place to go. The two reconcile and Sumiko decides to join Komajuro to start anew under another impresario at Kuwana. The last scene of the film shows Komajuro, tended by Sumiko, in a train heading for Kuwana.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053390/

Audition (1999)

AKA オーディション, Ōdishon

Directed by
Takashi Miike

Written by
Ryû Murakami (novel)
Daisuke Tengan (screenplay)

Shigeharu Aoyama (青山 重治 Aoyama Shigeharu) (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower of seven years, is urged by his 17-year-old son, Shigehiko Aoyama (青山 重彦 Aoyama Shigehiko) (Tetsu Sawaki), to begin dating again. Aoyama is reluctant. His friend and colleague Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (吉川泰久 Yoshikawa Yasuhisa) (Jun Kunimura), a film producer, devises a mock casting audition in which young women would audition for the "part" of Aoyama's new wife. Aoyama tentatively agrees to the plan. He is immediately enchanted by Asami Yamazaki (山崎 麻美 Yamazaki Asami) (Eihi Shiina). In her audition, Asami says that she was a ballerina but had to give up dancing after an injury. Aoyama is attracted to her apparent emotional depth.

Yoshikawa says that he has a bad feeling about Asami. He cannot reach any of the references on her résumé, and her job history is sketchy. The music producer she claimed to work for is missing. Aoyama is so enthralled by her that he pursues the romance anyway.

She lives in an empty apartment, containing a sack and a telephone. For four days after the audition, she sits perfectly still in the middle of the floor next to the telephone, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, the sack lurches across the room and makes gurgling sounds. When Asami answers the phone, she pretends to Aoyama that she never expected him to call.

After several dates, she agrees to accompany him to a seaside hotel. Asami reveals that she was abused as a child and shows burn scars on her body. A deeply moved Aoyama pledges his love, and they have sex. In the morning, Aoyama is awakened by a telephone call. It is the front desk inquiring if he will be checking out since his companion has left. Asami is nowhere to be found.

Aoyama tries to track her down using her résumé, but as Yoshikawa warned all of the contacts are dead ends. At the dance studio where she claimed to have trained, he finds only a man with prosthetic feet who shares the name of Asami's childhood abuser. The bar where she claimed to work has been abandoned for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner. A passer-by tells Aoyama that the police found three extra fingers, an extra ear, and an extra tongue when they recovered the body.

Meanwhile, Asami goes to Aoyama's house. She finds a photo of his late wife. Enraged, she drugs his liquor decanter and hides. Aoyama comes home, pours a drink, and begins feeling the effects of the drug.

A flashback sequence shows that the sack in Asami's apartment contains a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out of the sack and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog dish and places it on the floor for the man. The man sticks his face in the bowl of vomit, and hungrily consumes it.

Aoyama collapses from the drug. Asami injects Aoyama with a paralysis agent that leaves his nerves alert. She tortures him with needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else in her life, he has failed to love her only. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She claims she is teaching him the meaning of needing someone. She tells him that, "Words create lies, pain can be trusted." She giggles as she cuts off his left foot with a wire saw.

Shigehiko returns home as Asami begins to cut off Aoyama's other foot, and they struggle. Aoyama has a dream that he is waking up after he and Asami made love, and that his ordeal was only a nightmare. He awakes from the dream to see his son still struggling with Asami. Shigehiko kicks her down a flight of stairs, breaking her neck. Aoyama tells his son to call the police. Aoyama stares at the dying figure of Asami. She mutters incoherently about her excitement on seeing him again. He remembers that in the dream, he comforted her by saying, "It's hard to forget about, but someday you'll feel that life is wonderful."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/

The Adventure (1960)

AKA L'avventura

Directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni        

Writing credits
Michelangelo Antonioni
Elio Bartolini
Tonino Guerra

L'Avventura has a narrative structure in which an apparently important central mystery is gradually forgotten and left unsolved.

The story begins as two young women, Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti), meet for a yacht trip. After picking up Anna's lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), the three join two wealthy couples from Rome on the boat and visit "Lisca Bianca," an almost unpopulated volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, where Anna shows her boredom and unhappiness with the sometimes childish Sandro. After napping on the rocks, they awaken to find that Anna has gone without a trace. Annoyed at first, then worried, they search for her, helped by Anna's diplomat father who soon comes to the island with a police ship and helicopter.

Within a few days, they drift back to their lives as the story shifts to a new and somewhat stormy relationship between Sandro and Claudia who is at once happy and wracked with guilt over her missing best friend. On the rooftop of a cathedral, Sandro asks Claudia to marry him, but she is too startled by this to answer in a meaningful way. The two then check into a swank resort hotel near Messina where Sandro's business partner is staying. While Claudia goes to bed, Sandro stays up and wanders among the partying guests. Claudia spends a sleepless night waiting for him to come back to their room and as dawn breaks frantically searches for Sandro throughout the deserted public spaces of the hotel, only to find him on a couch with a costly call girl. Claudia flees them both and breaks down into tears on a vista overlooking the sea. Sandro, seemingly disgusted with himself, catches up to her.

The last scene, which has no dialogue, starkly shows Sandro's almost hopeless weakness and emptiness as he sits in tears before a blank, scarred wall. Claudia stands steadfastly beside him, while Mount Etna broods behind her as if ready to erupt.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053619/

Ecstasy of the Angels (1972)

AKA 天使の恍惚 / Tenshi no kôkotsu

Director:
Kôji Wakamatsu

Writer:
Masao Adachi

A group of militant extremists whom we know only by their code names - the days of the week - realize that they've been betrayed by their own organization when a nocturnal weapons raid on a U.S. Army base goes awry. The delicate internal balance of trust and friendship splinters apart. Their already fragile, idealistic young psyches quickly disintegrate into a morass of sexual paranoia, violent recrimination and sadistic torture that completely destroys their ability to function as an organization.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069358/

Stalker (1979)

AKA Сталкер

Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky        

Writing credits
Arkadiy Strugatskiy (novel "The Roadside Picnic")
Boris Strugatskiy (novel "The Roadside Picnic")
Arkadiy Strugatskiy
Boris Strugatskiy

The setting of the film is a tiny town on the outskirts of the Zone, a wilderness area which has been cordoned off by the government. The film's main character, the Stalker, works as a guide to bring people in and out of the Zone, to "the Room", which is said to grant the deepest, innermost wishes of anyone who steps inside. Residual effects of an undefined previous occurrence have transformed an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings into an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply.

The film begins, in black and white, with the Stalker in his home with his wife and daughter. His wife emotionally urges him not to leave her again to go into the Zone because of the legal consequences, but he ignores her pleas. The Stalker goes to a bar, where he meets the Writer and the Professor, who will be his clients on his next trip into the Zone. The Writer and the Professor are never identified by name — the Stalker prefers to refer to them in this way. The three of them evade the military blockade that guards the Zone using an 88" Series II Land-Rover — attracting gunfire from the guards as they go — and then ride into the heart of the Zone on a railway handcar. The camera follows their passage from urban setting to rural, and from the darkness required for their infiltration of the Zone, to light. This is also the point in the movie where the film switches to color.

The Stalker tells his clients that they must do exactly as he says to survive the dangers that, while invisible, are all around them. Although the Stalker describes extreme danger at all times, no harm comes to any of the three men; there is a tension between disbelief of the need for his elaborate precautions and the possibility that they are necessary. The Stalker tests various routes by throwing metal nuts tied with strips of cloth ahead of him before walking into a new area. The Zone appears peaceful and harmless. The Writer is skeptical that there is any real danger, while the Professor generally follows the Stalker's advice.

Much of the film focuses on the trip through the apparently dangerous Zone and the philosophical discussions that the characters share about their reasons for wanting to visit the Room. The Writer appears concerned that he is losing his inspiration, while the Professor apparently hopes to win a Nobel prize. Meanwhile, the Stalker — who explains that he has never gone into the Room himself — quotes from the New Testament and bemoans the loss of faith in society. Throughout the film, the Stalker refers to a previous Stalker, named "Porcupine," who led his poet brother to his death in the Zone, visited the Room and gained a lot of money, and then hanged himself. The implication is that our "deepest, innermost desires" are opaque even to ourselves, and the overt desire to win the lottery was coupled with the covert and unexpressed - perhaps unconscious - desire for his brother's death, and when Porcupine realized this, he killed himself to expiate his guilt. When the Writer confronts the Stalker about his knowledge of the Zone and the Room, he says that it all comes from Porcupine.

The trio first walk through meadows and then enter a tunnel that the Stalker calls "the meat grinder." In one of the decayed buildings, a phone inexplicably begins to ring. The Writer answers and says to whoever is on the other end that "this is not the clinic," and hangs up. The Professor then uses the phone to call a colleague. In the resultant conversation he reveals some of his true motives for having come to the Room. He has brought a bomb with him and intends to destroy the Room out of fear that it could be used for personal gain by evil men. The three men fight verbally and physically; the Professor backs down from his plan to destroy the Room. Their journey ends when they finally arrive at the entrance to the Room. A long take leaves the men sitting outside the Room, who then never enter it.[2] Rain begins to fall from a dark sky where a ceiling once was, into the ruined building, and the rainstorm gradually fades away, all in one shot.

The next scene shows the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor back in the bar. The Stalker's wife and child arrive. A mysterious black dog that followed the three men through the Zone is now in the bar with them. His wife asks where he got it; the Stalker says that it got attached to him and he could not leave it in the Zone. As the Stalker leaves the bar with his family and the dog, we see that his child, nicknamed "Monkey" is crippled, and cannot walk unaided. (Earlier dialogue has suggested that the child is affected by some form of genetic mutation as a "child of the Zone.") Later, when the Stalker's wife says she would like to visit the Room, he seems to have doubts about the Zone; he tells her he fears her dreams will not be fulfilled. While breaking the fourth wall, the Stalker's wife then contemplates her relationship with the Stalker, only to conclude that she is better off with him. The film ends with Monkey alone in the kitchen. She recites a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev and then lays her head on the table and appears to psychokinetically push three drinking glasses across the table, one after the other, with the last one falling to the floor. After the third glass falls to the floor, a train passes by (as in the beginning of the film), causing the entire apartment to shake.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/

Solaris (1972)

 AKA Солярис

Directed by
Andrey Tarkovskiy       

Writing credits
Stanislaw Lem (novel "Solaris")
Fridrikh Gorenshtein
Andrey Tarkovskiy

Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) spends his last day on Earth reflecting on his life while walking by a lake near his childhood home where his elderly father still lives. Kelvin is about to embark on an interstellar journey to a space station orbiting the remote oceanic planet Solaris. After decades of study, the scientific mission at the space station has barely progressed in its goal of understanding the planet. To make matters worse, most of the crew has succumbed to a series of emotional crises. Kelvin is dispatched to evaluate the situation aboard ship and determine whether the venture should continue.

Henri Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), a former space pilot, visits Kelvin. They watch film footage of Burton's own testimony years before of seeing an over-sized child on the ocean surface of Solaris while searching for two lost scientists. However, the cameras of his craft recorded only clouds and the flat ocean surface; Burton's report was dismissed as hallucinations. After failing to convince Kelvin of the truth of his experience, Burton leaves angrily only to later call Kelvin. He explains that he met the child of a scientist lost in that mission, and the child was reminiscent of the one he saw on Solaris.

Before departing Earth for Solaris, Kelvin destroys most of his personal mementos in a bonfire, noting the volume of keepsakes he has accumulated. In Kelvin's last conversation with his father (Nikolai Grinko), they realize that the father will not live to see Kelvin return. Although he readily accepted the mission, it is a choice that weighs heavily upon Kelvin's conscience.

Upon arrival at the Solaris space station, none of the three remaining scientists meet Kelvin, who finds the disarrayed space station dangerously neglected. He soon learns that his friend among the scientists, Dr. Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan), has mysteriously died. The two surviving crewmen are unhelpful, and give contradicting and confusing information. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) warns Kelvin not to overreact if he sees anything “unusual” on board the station. However, Kelvin soon glimpses other people aboard the station. While Kelvin sends news of the chaos on board the station, the oceans of Solaris begin swirling on the planet's surface.

Waking exhausted from a restless sleep, Kelvin finds a woman with him in his quarters despite the barricaded door. To his surprise, it is Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), his late wife who committed suicide some years before. However, she is mysteriously unaware of having committed suicide on Earth, and she is equally puzzled as to her presence in Kelvin's quarters. Grasping that she is a psychological construct brought on by the mysterious effects of Solaris, he lures her to a spacecraft and launches the illusion of his wife into outer space. In his haste to be rid of her, he is burned by the rocket’s blast. Dr. Snaut tends his burns and explains that the “visitors” began appearing after the scientists attracted the attention of Solaris, seemingly a sentient entity.

That evening, Hari reappears in his quarters. This time calm, Kelvin embraces Hari through the night. Later, Kelvin causes her to panic when she discovers the clothes of the first apparition and tries to leave the room. She beats her way through the room’s metal door, severely cutting herself. Kelvin carries her back to his bed, where her injuries heal before his eyes. Dr. Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn) calls for a meeting, and Kelvin introduces Hari as his wife, insisting they treat her respectfully. In their symposium, the scientists begin to understand that Solaris created Hari from Kelvin’s memories of his dead wife. The Hari present among them, though not human, thinks and feels as though she were. Sartorius theorizes the visitors are composed of neutrinos and that it might be possible to destroy them.

Kelvin shows Hari films of himself and his parents when he was a boy and, later, of his wife. While she is asleep, Snaut proposes beaming Kelvin’s brainwave patterns at Solaris in hopes that it will understand them and stop the disturbing apparitions as communication. However, Sartorius suggests a radical attack of heavy radiation bombardment. In time, Hari becomes independent and is able to exist beyond Kelvin’s sight. She learns from Sartorius that the original Hari had committed suicide ten years earlier, and Kelvin is forced to tell her the entire story. Distressed, Hari kills herself again by drinking liquid oxygen, only to painfully, spasmodically resurrect a few minutes later. On the surface of Solaris, the ocean is moving even faster.

In a fevered sleep, Kelvin dreams of his mother and of many Haris walking about his quarters. When he awakens, Hari is gone, and Snaut reads him the good-bye note she wrote him. The note indicates that Hari asked the scientists to kill her. Snaut tells Kelvin that since they broadcast Kelvin’s brainwaves at Solaris, the visitors stopped appearing, and islands began forming on the planet's surface. Kelvin debates whether or not to return to Earth or to descend to Solaris in hope of reconnecting with everything he has loved and lost.

Again at the shore of the frozen lake, Kelvin finds himself at his father's house. His dog runs to him, and he happily walks towards it. He realizes something is wrong when he sees water is falling inside the house but is unnoticed by his father, who appears in the house. Father and son embrace on the front step of the lakeside house, on an island in the middle of an ocean on Solaris.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/