Film

Abnormal Family: Brother's Wife (1984)

Director: Masayuki Suo

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Suo's debut was considered so scandalous that he wasn't offered another feature for six years. His 'crime' was to shoot a sex film as a pastiche of an Ozu family melodrama. A Tokyo widower (Osugi, impersonating Ozu's regular patriarch Chishu Ryu) has three grown-up kids. Koichi marries the bouncy Yukiko but soon lurches into an SM relationship with the local bar hostess and moves out. In his absence, brother Kazuo loses his virginity to Yukiko; sister Akiko starts working in a sex sauna and eventually marries its boss. Yukiko promises to go on looking after her father-in-law. The style parodies Ozu even more sharply than the storyline (non-eyeline-match cuts, clunky music cues, establishing shots used as punctuation) and the whole thing begins by mocking the Shochiku trademark. Not very sexy, but pretty funny.

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