Satoshi Miki is best known as a director of comedy, including episodes of the 2006-07 cult hit "Jiko Keisatsu (Time Limit Investigator)" series for TV Asahi and seven feature films. But when I programmed a special Miki section for the Udine Far East Film Festival in 2008, I realized anew how, film by film, his aims had grown beyond extracting laughs with his trademark absurdist gags, as popcorn-spewingly funny as they might be. In what many consider his best film to date, 2007's "Tenten (Adrift in Tokyo)," Miki transformed an oddball road-movie setup — a middle-aged loan shark and his college student client/victim embark on a walk across Tokyo — into an offbeat, surprisingly moving ode to cross-generational friendship and the city itself.
His new film "Ore Ore (It's Me, it's Me)," which had its world premiere at Udine last month with Miki and star Kazuya Kamenashi in attendance, goes even further beyond cute quirk territory into the strange and nightmarish. There are gags aplenty, in the dry, understated style familiar from his other films, but there is also an unsettling surrealism that undermines both a conventional understanding of the story — and reality.
The film starts as an offbeat caper comedy. Hitoshi (Kamenashi), a failed photographer turned electronics-store clerk, uses the cellphone an obnoxious fellow customer leaves behind in a fast-food joint to call the customer's mother and, impulsively posing as her son Daiki in a jam, persuades her to transfer ¥900,000 to his depleted bank account — an actual, often-used scam in Japan known as "ore ore."