Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Ososhiki (1984)

Director: Juzo Itami

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Another film about food, sex and death from Itami, inspired by his own participation in the funeral of his wife's father. Yamazaki and Miyamoto play a married couple who are hauled out of their dopey work in a TV studio and plunged into the exceedingly expensive business of co-ordinating the burial rites of the wife's cantankerous father. The three-day wake turns out to be a succession of absurd mishaps, family squabbles and unwelcome surprises, reaching its spiritual nadir when an uninvited woman guest drunkenly insists on having sex with Yamazaki before she'll agree to leave. A light-black satire, this is less a Japanese The Loved One than a rather feebly wishful attempt to revive the Ozu spirit in Japanese cinema. Invoking Ozu (and there are direct visual quotes from The End of Summer and other movies) is to invite comparisons, and that's unwise, given the film's uncertainty of tone and structure. The stand-out sequence is probably also the most realistic: the head of the family struggling to master funeral etiquette from an instructional video.

Author: TR 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Juzo Itami

Producer: Seigo Hosogoe

Cast: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Kin Sugai, Shuji Otaki, Ichiro Zaitsu, Nekohachi Edoya, Koen Okumura full cast

Duration: 124 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.