’Lust In The Rain’: Tokyo Review

Dir: Shinzo Katayama. Japan/Taiwan. 2024. 132mins

Gauche aspiring manga artist Yoshio (Ryo Narita) finds himself inhabiting the infrequently visited third corner of a love triangle that also includes Imori (Go Morita), a braggart novelist who is yet to publish anything, and slinky divorcee Fukuko (Eriko Nakamura) in Katayama Shinzo’s ambitious but uneven epic erotic drama. The surreal flourishes leave us in no doubt that at least some of the picture, which was adapted from a story by legendary manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge and is set predominantly in 1940s northern Japan, is Yoshio’s overheated sexual fantasy. But it’s not until some way into the film that the extent of this becomes clear, and the picture grows rather more emotionally complex and interesting.

The wryly titillating tone segues into something darker and more profoundly sorrowful

The manga source material, also titled Lust In The Rain, is a late-career work for Tsuge (it was first published in the early 80s), an artist whose popularity exploded during the 60s and whose surrealist style and countercultural inclinations have drawn comparisons with Robert Crumb. Like Crumb, Tsuge has a following in comic book circles, and a significant proportion of the film’s audience will likely be drawn from existing Tsuge fans. After its Tokyo premiere the film will screen in Tallinn and should serve to raise the profile of director Katayama, who debuted with Siblings Of The Cape (2018) and earned the New Director Award from the Directors Guild of Japan for his second film Missing (2022).

Katayama is certainly a director who is not afraid to take a potentially divisive approach. It’s quite a bold move to open a film with an eroticised rape sequence. And if later revelations (quite a bit later, this is a picture that takes a long while to get the grist of the story) put a different perspective on the events of the first 70 minutes or so, the fact remains that this is a film which is inordinately fond of male-gaze shots of pert breasts and sweat-glistening female sexual ecstasy. 

The opening scene, which gives the film its title, is immediately revealed to be a fantasy in the mind of the socially awkward and sexually frustrated Yoshio, who promptly turns it into his latest Manga. But the market for his work is not exactly ravenous, and Yoshio owes rent to his unsavoury landlord Oyaji (Naoto Takenaka). It’s through Oyaji that Yoshio first meets Fukuko, when both he and Imori are persuaded by Oyaji to help her move house. When the men arrive, not only is Fukuko not packed but she’s enjoying a languorous naked daytime nap – a revelation that sends Yoshio’s libido and sketch pad into overdrive. He’s too slow in making a move however, and Fukuko and Imori hook up, and, for various reasons, move into Yoshio’s cramped apartment shortly afterward.

To give away the film’s reveal would be to spoil one of the film’s more successful aspects. Suffice to say, the hallucinatory qualities of the storytelling start to gel with the story itself. And the picture’s wryly titillating tone segues into something darker and more profoundly sorrowful.

There are questions about tonal inconsistencies and the film’s depiction of its female characters. This certainly won’t be for everyone. But there’s technical artistry on show. The soundscape is layered and unnerving. And it looks terrific, with the unmodernised streets of Chiayi City in central Taiwan doubling for post-war Japan. Its rich jewelled colour palette is a pleasure to look at, and other later scenes are mounted with a visceral intensity. What at first seems like an exploitative wet dream turns into a genuinely unsettling nightmare.