Charisma

Koji Hashimoto stars as Yabuike, an overworked policeman who dwells in the same paint-peeled, pre-millennium municipal buildings as his Cure doppelgänger, detective Takabe. Following a disastrous hostage intervention, in which Yabuike hesitated to shoot a man holding a politician at gunpoint when the opportunity presented itself, the dishevelled cop is driven out to a forest by a colleague then abandoned at a rusting bus stop. No connecting service ever materialises so Yabuike presses on into this decaying, autumnal wood, eventually encountering a three-way dispute regarding a dying tree named Charisma. Before becoming embroiled in the various factions that spit and snipe at each over a sapling wrapped in scaffolding, Yabuike encounters the skeletal remains of a salaryman, dangling from a tree. The man, quite apparently dead for some time, has been completely claimed by the forest - transformed into an unlikely planter for a particularly verdant moss. Similarly, the withered tree Charisma, festooned with IV drips and therefore literally on life-support, seems to take its nourishment only from the surrounding plants and trees. Around the trunk there is a blasted semi-circle of death, the peers that have been sacrificed to maintain what little life remains to this arbor. Charisma, described as a mutant import from the mainland, is sucking this environment dry then. In writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film, an absurdist comedy that slowly sinks into a kind of apocalyptic dementia, life and death are held in strict balance. No element can truly prosper within the piece without explicitly taking something, often violently, from another.