Aki and Naoko are childhood friends who are drifting apart as adults. Immersed in her family life, Naoko now has a husband and daughter; Aki, on the other hand, remains single and is on leave from work due to a personal crisis. The plot might sound familiar but it has never been told like this. The director Kusano Natsuka stages the interactions through an actors’ table-read and, as the lines are repeated, the scenes gradually develop into on-location conversations. Moreover, she repositions the dramatic peak of the story to the beginning: Aki has murdered Naoko’s daughter. Structurally inventive, Kusano's daring cinema implements ‘distantiation’ effects to get to the heart of friendship issues at times when life has settled. While the repetitions convey the suffocation of role patterns in both friendship and family, a line left out or added in unsettles and reminds us life can take unexpected turns.
汤姆·哈迪,李梅,杨雁雁,蒂莫西·奥利芬特,福里斯特·惠特克,贾斯汀·康维尔,奎琳·塞普尔维达,路易斯·古兹曼,米歇尔·沃特森,冯推守,吉姆·凯萨,克塞利亚·门德斯-琼斯,理查德·哈林顿,娜格斯·拉什迪,詹妮弗·阿尔莫,汤姆·吴,杰瑞米·安·琼斯,吉尔·温特尼茨,戈登·亚历山大,戴维·张振熙,杰克·莫里斯,Jon-Scott Clark