Of Monster Mode

A young man in a green Martian costume allows himself to be dragged hither and thither by a bossy housewife. In this way the film swerves between deceptively ordinary realism and a fantastic absurdism. The housewife Junko (Otori Rei) has started to behave increasingly strangely since the death of her son. Her husband can’t put up with it any more and goes off with a female colleague. The man in the green suit, Katsura Tombo (Oda Yonosuke), is a bread salesman but he forgets his work. His strange costume is supposed to lure new customers, but he seems to have forgotten that. He is more or less kidnapped by Junko and falls in love with her. Junko however has other intentions with the rather naive salesman. The failed Martian drives her around in his aunt’s van, but his helpfulness doesn’t get rewarded.
The dead son occasionally interferes in the story as a strikingly mature and omniscient narrator. In between all the jokes he explains the dominant sorrow.
The film maker took the idea for his bizarre film story from a quote from Ihara Saikaku, a 17th-century Japanese poet. He is supposed to have said: ‘ People are nothing but monsters’. The director did not take the statement too literally. His people remain very human, even though they are all a little out of the ordinary, but that is more comic than tragic and certainly not monstrous. (GjZ)

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