Bare Essence of Life (Ultra-Miracle Love Story)

Hot young Japanese actor Matsuyama plays Yojin, a 25-year-old farmer who acts like an excitable child because his brain is ‘wired differently’. Yojin develops a crush on the village’s new kindergarten teacher Miss Machiko, so tries to tone down his behaviour to woo her - there are two wonderful extended scenes of the pair talking unselfconsciously as he walks her home from work. Then things get strange. Yojin dies of a heart attack, but is alive and well in the next scene. Then he dies again, and Machiko – whose previous boyfriend was decapitated – keeps his brain in a jar, before feeding it to a bear. This bizarre shift in tone colours all that has gone before it, making it hard to distinguish the real from the surreal. Which is a shame, as the real part was rather charming.