Some Kinda Love

A deliberate return to the kind of indie feature he made way back when, Some Kinda Love does the ‘skewed triangle’ thing more ambiguously than any other Nagasaki movie. Anzai (TV comedian Ishii, cast against type) is a town planner; his former classmate Shibata (Tamaki, who also contributed the score) is a developer not averse to bending the rules and paying the odd sweetener. Both men have their lives turned upside down by a chance encounter with Kiriko (Mizushima, in real life the director’s wife), a young woman whose obsession with UFOs reflects her inability to stay in one place for long. She seems interested in both of them, and unable to decide between them … Not as overtly perverse as you might expect (given the Lou Reed reference in the English title), this is an intimate movie about the moment when adolescence shades into adulthood – or maybe about the way that ‘adulthood’ doesn’t feel as grown-up as you thought it would. Made with deceptive simplicity, it replays many of Nagasaki’s favourite themes and motifs as tragi-comedy. Ancillary pleasures include cameos from Tetsuo director Tsukamoto Shinya as another town-planner and Nagasaki veteran Naito Takeshi as a forlorn but stoic dentist. (TR)

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