Ugly digital video was the craze that year. The story of two fuckups working dead-end jobs until the ambitious one (post-Ichi Tadanobu Asano) murders their annoying boss and gives his pet jellyfish to the useless one (Joe Odagiri of Princess Raccoon). The imprisoned guy’s dad (Tatsuya Fuji, star of Oshima’s Passion/Senses) shows up to figure out what happened, while the useless guy accidentally infests the river with a swarm of killer red jellyfish. This movie felt unusual back then, and remains so.
B. Kite:
The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fish through an overhead shot of the group drifting through the city streets at night, illumined by their glowing walkie-talkie headsets. Their aimlessness and matching uniforms might not suggest anything spectacularly promising, but Kurosawa places the title under them as a caption – Bright Future – and has insisted he means it. Why not? Like the fish, they’re adaptable and perched on the point of transition … Ambivalent Future, the fascinating documentary made during the film’s shooting by Fujii Kenjiro, shows the extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa’s artistic process. He expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures or help the actors find their way into a role.
The boss interfering in his employees’ personal lives, on his last day alive:
