The Volatile Woman

In a simple location and with only a couple of actors, Kumakiri tells a striking story about complex feelings: about attraction and rejection, about how close love and hate can be. Etsuko is a widow. Not very young, but not very old either. She runs a remote filling station that is far from successful. One day, one evil day you could also call a good one, a bank robber comes in. The rejection and attraction begins. She stabs him with a knife, but does not go to the police. He has awoken something in her. The film is made on a very small budget in a series of six films with six different directors. The theme of the series was ‘Love and Eros’. Eros within Japanese film inevitably refers to the notorious Nikkatsu novel porn productions, otherwise known as pink pictures. For Kumakiri, the film is also a homage to the master of the narrative Japanese sex film, Kumashiro Tatsumi. All the films by Kumashiro had the word woman (onna) in the title and Kumakiri wanted to do this too. Not that the film is a porno film in the European sense of the word: this film is as close to a porno film as a refined restaurant is to an abattoir. (GjZ)

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