Toshiaki
Karasawa, Kyoka Suzuki , Masahiko Nishimura, Keiko Toda, Jun Inoue
, Toshiyuki Hosokawa, Kaoru Okunuki , Zen Kajiwara
Noted television screenwriter
and founder of the acclaimed theatrical group Tokyo Sunshine Boys,
Koki Mitani makes his directorial debut with this wickedly funny
look at a live radio broadcast gone horribly wrong. As a part of
a PR stunt, a Tokyo radio station holds an amateur screenwriting
contest and the winner (and only contestant) is a meek and guileless
housewife named Miyako (Kyoka Suzuki) who spun a sincere little
melodrama about a marriage falling apart. At first, everything seems
like a dream -- the show's high-strung producer Ushijima (Masahiko
Nishimura) is calling Miyako by the honorific sensei and the cast
and crew seem to radiate a cool, yet heartfelt, professionalism.
Then calamity strikes. Prima donna actress Nokko (Keiko Toda) --
who is ticked off at the current state of her career -- decides
moments before air time that her character Ritsuko should be named
Mary Jane. Instead of being a modest housewife, Mary Jane is casually
turned into a high-powered lawyer. Soon the other characters want
to play glamorous foreigners too. The setting is switched from sleeping
resort town Atami to Manhattan and then later Chicago. The romantic
male goes from being a truck driver to a pilot and then an astronaut.
As further plot changes continue to pile up -- ranging from gangster
hits to dam breaks to moon landings -- Ushijima and director Kudo
(Toshiaki Karasawa) try desperately to keep ahead of things while
poor Miyako -- her dreams of being a screenwriter thoughtlessly
trashed -- quietly seethes.
This film was screened
at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival.
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