Zigeunerweisen

The first and arguably best achieved part of Suzuki's 'Taisho Trilogy' (Kagero-za and Yumeji followed) is a shaggy-ghost-dog story in which assorted ambiguities of identity and memory turn on a 78rpm record of Pablo de Sarasate playing Zigeunerweisen. Nakasago (Harada) is a wild and crazy hedonist obsessed by the geisha Koine (Otani); he marries her dead ringer (Otani again) but abandons her for Koine as she is about to give birth to their child - later installing the geisha as a surrogate mother when his wife dies of flu. These events repercuss on his one-time colleague Aochi (Fujita), a stolid professor of German, who remembers hearing the Sarasate record but is sure he never borrowed it... Playful, sensuous and performed and shot with élan, this looks very much like a riddle without a solution.