Ososhiki

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.