Director Tetsuya Nakashima’s been drifting from amusing entertainment (Kamikaze Girls) to visual overdrive melodrama trash (Memories of Matsuko). His latest hit Confessions turns out something different. It’s a cold but endlessly poetic exercise in anti-humanism, a sort of In the Mood for Love of revenge and death, in which junior high school teacher takes revenge against students who killed her daughter. From Nakashima it’s an unexpectedly lifeless film, very much decidedly so. What it’s lacking is good characters – almost everyone is driven by obsessions or trauma, leaving them very one dimensional and predictable. What is, however, rather amazing is the care put into cinematography and visual planning. Confessions may be the closest a movie has ever become to a living photograph. It’s an audio-visual art work played mostly in slow motion, with nothing to do with the real world aside some dark social commentary. At times very impressive, one must still wonder what we would have in our hands if the same care had gone into a movie with more lively characters. As it is, there is only one player (Mizuki / Ai Hashimoto) with enough fragility to make her psychologically interesting.
Blu-Ray
CN Entertainment (HK)
Region A
BD-25 (film size 20GB)
Video: 1080p anamorphic widescreen
Audio: Japanese DTS 5.1 HD, Japanese DD 5.1
Subtitles: Chinese, English (noticed one typo, seemed otherwise fine to me)
Extras: trailer (sd) and picture gallery
The first three captures can be compared to the UK caps found here:
http://www.asianblurayguide.com/capture ... d_kingdom/
