4-mat room littered with crusty tissues, cartons of rotting

[Taro Toporific]

film review:"No One's Ark"
--21st San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

...Yamashita Nobuhiro's slack-beyond-slack debut, Hazy Life, provided one of the scurviest visions of video-porn consumption ever seen, much of it taking place in a four-mat room littered with crusty tissues, cartons of rotting take-out food, and a fantastically winning loser sporting a Leningrad Cowboys Go America quiff, a pair of ruined gold slippers, and the unlikeliest of Japanese names, Kiyomantes.

Yamashita's follow-up, No One's Ark, ventures into the world of actual romance, though with an equally awful (and hilarious) attitude toward intimacy. In it, a fabulously disheveled would-be entrepreneur and his long-suffering girlfriend return to his hometown with plans to launch a new health drink they've developed. The problem is, the beverage is undrinkable (it looks like rancid tomato juice flecked with bits of carpet fuzz), but the looks on the faces of those who sample it are nothing compared to the film's signature image of the couple's unraveling devotion to each other: him, naked, on all fours, with his scrawny ass stuck in her face as she daubs away at its deepest reaches with globs of some unidentified ointment. Yamashita's got a real flair for cruel stories of evaporating youth and Aki Kaurismaki-like sense of life's poignantly nauseating rhythms, but it's his talent for visualizing the viscous residues of Japan's burst economic bubble that really sticks to the screen.