Second film by the director who made a name for himself as a new and original talent in modern Japanese cinema with his first film Kikuchi. The alienating style of his début has been maintained in its successor and enriched with absurdism and humour. Monkeys in Paradise mixes apparently incompatible genres such as comedy and experimental film; avant-garde you can laugh at.Protagonists in the film are the four members of a model family, or rather a parody on one. A father who abuses his position as office manager to harass his female staff, a mother who feels neglected and puts on an artistic act to seduce a colleague, a daughter who lives in continual fear of being attacked on the street by a sex maniac and a son who tries desperately to win back his ex-girlfriend. All four are extremely introverted and any communication is difficult. It is far from being a happy family and their holiday comprises a series of (comic) disasters.Monkeys in Paradise is situated in the sixties; the years of the Japanese economic miracle. With great feeling for detail and with an expressive use of colour and image, Iwamoto evokes a caricatured yet very familiar world. The images in the film are ironic while providing a painfully accurate picture of a society that tries to deny its own culture and copies the West to an absurd degree.
