Dogs

Nagasaki could easily have taken the Miike route in the 1990s, churning out four or five direct-to-video features a year and trying to give them some ‘edge’, but he chose instead to look for ways to move his own agenda forward. This `hard-boiled love story’ (co-written by Nakajima Goro, his collaborator on The Enchantment) was his first digitally-shot feature, and it’s a flawless combination of motifs from vintage film noir with the theme first explored in The Drive: a tough woman dragging a weaker man deeper and deeper into crime. Woman cop Miki is chasing a wanted man (another cameo from Tsukamoto Shinya) when she stumbles on a crashed car and sees the driver, Koichi, ignite spilled petrol to kill himself and his passenger. She drags Koichi to safety, but the passenger dies. Miki says nothing to challenge the inquest finding of `accidental death’, and when she visits Koichi in hospital he begins to understand that her complicity in his crime implies a sexual invitation. But a gumshoe (played by novelist Hosaka Kazushi) has photos of the crash, and the only way to stall his blackmail is to kill him, the first of several murders… Did I mention that it’s shot in lustrous black-and-white? (TR)