Sweet Little Lies

2010, 117 min., 35 mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. Directed by Hitoshi Yazaki. With Miki Nakatani, Nao Omori, Juichi Kobayashi.

Closing Film
Introduction and Q&A with director Hitoshi Yazaki

Miki Nakatani, "the best Japanese actress of her generation" (Mark Schilling, Japan Times) plays the emotionally and sexually starved wife in Hitoshi Yazaki’s Sweet Little Lies, the anti-melodramatic chronicle of the disintegration of a marriage. Shot and told with astounding formal finesse, the film evokes the mastery of Japanese classic film directors like Mikio Naruse.

Underneath the veneer of orderly lives, frozen smiles and awkward averted glances, Sweet Little Lies is the cold-as-steel clinical study of a couple, Ruriko (Miki Nakatani) and Satoshi (Nao Omori). Married for three years, they keep up the apparently tender rituals of newlyweds: they still take time to have a real breakfast together; they still have dinner together when he comes home from his IT job. In the daytime, Ruriko painstakingly and lovingly handcrafts teddy bears that she exhibits in art galleries. Not all is as bright and beautiful as it would seem. In other words, no sex.

Even the most seasoned viewers will be struck by the menacing calm of Yazaki’s compositions, and his unveiling of lives made from lies.

Part of Japan Cuts: Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema

TICKETS
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