Shaun de Waal Japanese movie of the week
Japanese director Sabu’s movie Postman Blues is completely – and engagingly – bonkers. It could almost share a title with Haruki Murakami’s bestselling novel A Wild Sheep Chase, except that sheep don’t feature; it certainly shares Murakami’s off-beat sense of humour and his tendency to whip together various genres (gangster drama, comedy, love story) with wild abandon.
Sawaki (Shinichi Tsutsumi) is a young postman, leading a dully conscientious life, who discovers one day that a postcard he has to deliver is addressed to an old friend, Noguchi (Keisuke Horibe), whom he hasn’t seen in a while. He locates the apartment and the friend, only to discover that Noguchi is an aspirant member of a yakuza gang, required to perform some gruesome self-mutilation as an initiation rite.
Sawaki’s encounter with Noguchi – and the attentions of some over-enthusiastic policemen – leads to all sorts of bizarre and increasingly funny complications.
Characters soon added to the mix are the moribund assassin Joe (Ren Ohsugi) and the beautiful cancer patient Sayoko (Keiko Tohyama).
And through this, ahem, mailstrom, on his red bicycle, blithely sails Sawaki. His indomitable innocence is at the epicentre of this odd movie’s considerable charm.
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