Film

Untama Giru (1989)

Director: Go Takamine

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Another paean to Okinawa's 'sacred indolence', this reunites the stars of Paradise View in a mythic/poetic social satire which plays like a fullscale orchestration of the themes and plotlines of the earlier film. The original Untama Giru was an Okinawan Robin Hood; the film's Giru (Kobayashi) is an exploited worker in 1969 who flees into the Untama forest after learning that his boss's adopted daughter is actually a crazed sow in human guise. While he teaches himself to levitate, the rest of the island debates what should become of Okinawa when the US (represented by John Sayles as a commissioner who gets off on blood transfusions from monkeys and pigs) hands it back to Japan. With the most unlikely barbershop quintet in film history serving as a chorus, this is doubtless the most spaced-out agit-prop ever filmed.

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