Tezuka's Barbara (2019)

Yosuke is a successful and popular novelist, quite a celebrity in Japan who looks to be set for big things with a politician's daughter as a fiancé, but when he meets a hard-drinking libertine named Barbara who may or may not be a figment of his imagination and tells him his novels are shallow, she becomes his muse as he searches for a deeper artistic well to draw from.

The film is based on a manga from the early 1970's written by Osamu Tezuka and was directed by his son, Makoto Tezuka. Apparently the manga was quite mature for the time, and it seems to have been recreated in the film somewhat faithfully based on my quick googling, but is presumably rather condensed. Alcohol and drug use are prevalent, as is quite a bit of risqué sex and an encounter with a strange occult group.

It all left me pretty cold though, the characters never felt real (and the ones that actually aren't real don't get a free pass for that) and it never felt like we were getting an insight into their minds - a problem for a film which presents a very subjective tale.

The film's metaphors are obvious - a writer's dilemma about whether commercial success and artistic integrity are incompatible leads to self-doubt and self-sabotage. It's a favourite topic of writers.

Fumi Nikaido does what she can to infuse Barbara with the spirit of freedom and creativity that she is supposed to represent, and her performance is definitely the best part of the film... in fact it's probably the only reason I can think of to watch it. I didn't sense any chemistry between her and Goro Inagaki though, even in the sex scenes it didn't seem like they had any connection.

With Christopher Doyle on hand I expected the film to be a lot more stylish than it actually is, most of the time it feels rather cheap and digital, not very cinematic at all. There are a couple of scenes that contradict that, but overall I wouldn't rate it as an aesthetically accomplished film.

I'd be interested to see an animated version of this, as the more phantasmagoric and hallucinatory parts would have been better served by a psychedelic visual style that would be easier to achieve in animation.