Allow me to preface this by saying I thoroughly enjoy several of Ryu Murakami's novels and find his film "Tokyo Decadence" to be highly underrated. ( "Tokyo Degeneracy" would've been an equally apt title).
That brings us to Kyoko / Because of You / Dance with Me, which I had taken the effort to seek out and import due to curiosity and being impressed with Tokyo Decadence. Unfortunately I've been left thoroughly disappointed to the point of confusion.
Everything in Tokyo Decadence that suggested competency is missing in Kyoko, everything. Kyoko plays off as amateurish for the duration of its runtime, mostly delivering cringeworthy results and at others unexpected hilarity.
I really regret not taking notes whilst viewing Kyoko so I could truly convey how awful this movie is, since I have no intention of seeing it again, points from memory will have to do.
Every performance in this movie is uniformly terrible, that lead actress Saki Takaoka received any kind of recognition for this role and even awards boggles the mind, this is not to say she is a terrible actress, she may well be a master thespian in her native tongue, unfortunately she can barely pronounce an english sentence with any kind of coherence and it's genuinely painful to watch, equally painful to say is that she is a mediocre dancer at best - the little girl in the brief flashback scenes even outdoes her in this department, she does have a charming, childlike naivety in a handful of scenes but that's the absolute most positive thing I can say about her in this film.
One scene toward the end of the first act is genuinely reminiscent of something out of a David Lynch film, Kyoko is at a bar with an obsessive chauffeur and the barman who is a native English speaker talks in "Engrish" throughout the whole scene, Kyoko then dances in stilted fashion with cuts to bar patrons watching like mannequins - the scene is one of the highlights of the movie and is truly bizarre.
The cinematography is flat and often poorly lit, it's hard to believe that "Tokyo Decadence" was so well shot and was followed up by this, it's a truly dull looking film.
Really hoping that the language barrier and ultra low budget is what resulted in Kyoko being such a misfire but we'll likely never know, if this is to be Murakami's final directorial effort it's a great shame. Some moments of unintentional humour may make this worthwhile for a select few but mostly it is just painful to sit through.
2/10.
