RAIGYO: THE WOMAN IN BLACK UNDERWEAR

IF I DO SPOIL THIS MOVIE FOR ANYONE, AND I SAVE YOU A FEW QUID IN RENTALS, THEN I CAN LIVE WITH THAT

Here's a Japanese art movie, marketed as a sleaze film, and while it may live up to its title in terms of there being some raigyo in it (apparently some kind of fish) AND a woman in black underwear, it really doesn't live up to its trashy promise. If you saw your local 'plex screening something called "The Woman In Black Underwear" you'd expect some kind of grubby exploitation flick and this absolutely isn't what you get here. What you get is 74 minutes of bleak misery and emotional despair interspersed with meaningless sexual couplings and a couple of violent deaths. And several shots of fish.

No-one's happy in Raigyo. A woman leaves the hospital (she's suffering from a pancreas disorder) and hooks up firstly with a cheating husband in a sleazy hotel; after a bout of sexual malarkey she stabs him to death. He was also an expectant father; she's had an abortion. Then she hooks up with an attendant at the nearly petrol station and, after a second bout of sexual malarkey, he kills her as she was trying to kill herself out of guilt, and he's interested in what it might be like to kill someone. And that's kind of it.

Chunks of it are done in long takes with no music and static cameras. There are no laughs or thrills and the nudity isn't erotic - it's a proper art movie about proper people with real feelings and emotions. But it's just dull. Even at less than an hour and a quarter it's hard to get through, none of the characters are attractive or sympathetic and it's really impossible to care about anything that happens. I was immediately minded to look at my rentals list and cross off any other Japanese films that look a bit smutty. Surprisingly uninteresting. Arty, but uninteresting.

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