Swimming with Tears

Tashiro's debut feature is a weird mix of breast-beating, social concern, museum-piece melodramatics and coolly detached style. It's one of the many contemporary movies to focus on Asian immigrants to Japan: in this case, a Filipina mail-order bride who gives up on her Japanese peasant husband and flees to Tokyo in search of her Japanese father. There are a couple of interesting plot strands (the best concerns a kindly but odd Japanese couple with a guilty secret in their closet), but the film founders on the sheer sentimentality of its view of Asians in Japan. Pity: if it had an ounce of cynicism to it, comparisons with Fassbinder might have been in order.