The Frame

Yoko, a TV reporter, gets a videotape on which a murder and a corruption scandal seem to come together involving a major university and the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication. In her broadcast Yoko includes a video fragment in which Aso, a civil servant at the relevant ministry, is accused. He argues he is innocent and starts following Yoko. One day another videotape turns up in Yoko's post: the camera has apparently followed Yoko into the room where she is lying asleep... Isaka Satoshi first came to international attention with a very intelligent first feature exercise in media-self-conscious horror entitled Focus. In that film he succeeded in making the ever-watching camera a real protagonist in the chase, twisting the tension via its never-ending, obsessive voyeurism. In The Frame Isaka extends the principles of that first feature. His characters themselves become the paranoid victims or the practitioners of obsessive stalking. Inhabiting the modern world dominated by TV, it seems that one is either controlling the cameras to reveal the life of others or subject to the camera's unseen eye. Isaka wraps this theme around his story of the woman editor who trapping her victim in front of the public then has her privacy invaded with chilling consequences. But his plot twists and turns even more unexpectedly. (S.F.)