A middle aged man named Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) decides, seven years after his wife's death, and on the advice of his son (Tetsu Sawaki), that it is time to remarry. He doesn't know how to go about meeting the perfect woman: he thinks he's too old for casual dating, and he wants to make sure he finds the right person the first time. He is a movie producer, and he and his partner Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura) come up with the idea of holding auditions for a movie and choosing his bride from the actresses who apply. He fixes quickly on one girl, Asami (Eihi Shiina), a former dancer whose personal statement seems to reflect Aoyama's depressing view of life. Yasuhisa instinctively doesn't like her, and he goes to great pains to check up on her, revealing that just about everything she told them was a lie. Aoyama doesn't care: he's in love, and he sets about wooing her. She seems to have no past, no life except waiting for his call, but what's that in the big burlap sack in the center of her living room? As they grow closer, the warning signs pile up, but Aoyama is oblivious. He wants to marry her, and he will let nothing stop him.

That's about all of the plot that I can reveal. It takes a hallucinatory turn around halfway through, and a friend described it as "a Japanese David Lynch film." This is an accurate description, for good and bad. Toward the end, it follows the terrible logic of a nightmare, and it is often impossible to tell whether we are seeing the past, the present, the future, or the inside of someone's dreams. It's all very well done, but a lot of it frankly bugged me. If you haven't seen the movie and you want to be surprised by it, or if you don't want to hear my theories about patriarchy and sexuality, please stop reading now.

The patriarchy's ideal woman is an obedient, pretty woman who will do a man's bidding without complaint, bear him children, etc. (not much different, actually, from an American ideal that still holds favor). Lurking in that system is a sort of dual fear: fear of what will happen if women refuse to fulfill these subordinate roles, and a conflicting fear that the complete submission will somehow backfire. This film is an almost perfect example of patriarchal cultures' adolescent fear of female sexuality. It fashions, in its female lead Asami, a prototypical "perfect woman." She's not even a person, really: she's just a fantasy. She's submissive, she's beautiful, she has talents (dancing) that will make her a good showpiece for her husband, she's smart but not too smart (wouldn't want her to get ideas), and, most importantly, she falls for Aoyama almost immediately. But she wants him to love only her, you see, and there's the problem. Once the two of them sleep together (thus awakening the sexual beast), she won't allow him to still be in love with his first wife, or even to love his son. She freaks out, and he discovers that she's a murderess who plans on torturing him to death for his disloyalty. Her submission and loyalty go and backfire into castration. Not real, symbolic: what do you think is going on with the amputation of his feet, if it's not symbolic castration?

I find, lately, that I have a lot less patience for this kind of claptrap. It seems that in more movies than you would imagine, aroused female sexuality will only result in mayhem and destruction, usually of a more or less innocent man. Think about how many jealous female lovers in how many movies can't understand rejection and go on killing sprees or otherwise freak out. Fatal Attraction is the most popular example, but you find them everywhere. All I know is that much of the last third of this movie seriously bothered me, and as I thought about the rest of the film later, much of it bothers me too. (Of course I'm not saying, as one reader suggested, that all men in movies are portrayed positively and all women negatively. That's preposterous. I'm just pointing out a trend that I am certainly not the first to notice.)

There was a moment in this last stretch of the film when I thought it was going to take an about-face and turn into a deconstruction of this fear. Aoyama suddenly wakes up in bed at the resort where he slept with Asami. She's sleeping peacefully beside him. What if all the horrible things we had seen up to that point were just his nightmares, his mind acting out his unreasonable fears of women? What if he realized how ridiculous it all was, kissed her, and fell back asleep? I found myself hoping that would happen; it would have been a nice refutation of the Fatal Attraction business. But I knew it wouldn't.

There's a tendency when watching a movie to not think about who made it. Keep in mind that this is not just some psycho woman doing this, this is a psycho woman written by a man who is doing this. What does her behavior tell you about the filmmakers? It doesn't tell you anything about women. This film is skillfully made, expertly directed, well acted, and pretty distasteful.