2/ Duo

A really wonderful and visceral pseudo-documentary with a distinctly Japanese twist. The film follows a boyfriend/girlfriend duo through a tumultuous period in their lives: the boy is an underachieving actor who wants to sleep all day, the girl is a depressed shop assistant. The film does a wonderful job of painting deep and complex characters without making anything too overstated. The characters barely talk to each other about their deteriorating mental states, instead talking to an unseen narrator about what they hint at with their actions. The whole fly-on-the-wall approach gives the movie an underlying tone of profound alienation and shows rather than tells the audience the negative consequences of the emotionally repression that's unfortunately so common in Japan. Viewers without firsthand experience of Japan might find something lacking, but everyone I know who's lived in Japan has thought the characterizations were eeriely accurate. Definitely worth the effort to track down.