Body Drop Asphalt

The first 30 minutes of Wada's fabulous debut feature looks like one of her bouncy, erotic short films: a litany of hesitations, a flurry of fetishes, a molehill of cute self-doubt. Then the narrative kicks in, and the film turns into an epically enjoyable comedy satire with everything from literary pretensions to doomsday fantasies in its sights. Eri (Oyamada) is a lonely city singleton who knocks out a trashy romantic novel and is amazed to find herself feted by the lit-crit establishment. She succumbs to a fashionable lifestyle, but since her own romantic experiences fall somewhat short of her fiction she starts writing a sequel in which her heroine Rie suffers the tortures of the damned and commits suicide. But then Rie (Ogi) emerges from the laptop to demand a rethink. With a wonderful score, zippy primary colour images, great UFO jokes and a guest appearance by veteran avant-gardist Katsu Kanai as God, this is the most fun of its kind since Godard's Une Femme est une femme.