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| THE MYSTERY OF RAMPO | Japan |
 A
visual wonder, a dizzy hallucination, the greatest
success in Japan in the year it was launched. A unique
combination of animation, virtual reality, eroticism,
Jorge Luis Borges, Sade, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch,
and David Cronenberg. And also of Edgar Allan Poe, that
in Japanese is pronounced Rampo, psudonym for the written
Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965) on whose life and mystery
stories, the film is based.Japan such as we see it on film is military pre-World War II. The art-déco scenarios produce excursions as though they were an unknown de luxe hotel, with reversals between illusion and reality: the writer inventing the mystery based on a reality that is confused with the plot of his story. Immersion into Rampo's universe reveals the main characters of his memorable novels only now cultivated in Japan: the great detective Kogoro Akechi, comparable to Sherlock Holmes, and Shizuko, a beautiful and mysterious incarnation of his heroines. To commemorate the centennial of the foundation, the Shochiku production did not spare resources and sumptuosity in the film of the new filmmaker Kazuyoshi Okuyama. |
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