Debeso

A distant relative of Ozu's Floating Weeds, this picaresque road-movie is based on the memoirs of the manager of the Dotonbori Theatre in Tokyo's Shibuya, a strip-tease theatre which closed down in December 1995. It's set in the early 1960s in various parts of rural Japan, and chronicles the changing fortunes of a travelling vaudeville troupe which tries to break away from its Yakuza owners and go independent. Yabe Kotaro (played by comedian Kataoak Tsurutaro) is a failed hoodlum who comes out of a two-year jail term for attempted murder and very reluctantly walks into a job as the troupe's manager. He turns out to be the least corrupt and most generous leader the troupe has ever had, but there are countless emotional, sexual and criminal problems to overcome before he leaves for Tokyo at the end.Apron Stage is essentially a sex film; the raunchy stage performances which punctuate it every fifteen minutes or so and the emphasis on backstage liaisons and romances define it as one for the back room of the video store. But from this not very promising material Mochizuki fashions a surprisingly likeable and humane film, rich in bits and pieces of social history and full of character and incident. It also contains a very fine cameo by Okuda Eiji as the finger-chopping Yakuza who changes Yabe's life. (Tony Rayns)