Yoshihiro Nakamura makes movies that puzzle, surprise and illuminate their themes both cleverly and literally (the fireworks of "Golden Slumber," the comet of "Fish Story"). Everyone's heard of the "butterfly effect" — how a small action in one place (a butterfly flapping its wings in a South American jungle) can cause a large impact in another (a hurricane in Florida). But in "Fish Story" (2009), his masterpiece to date, Nakamura takes us brilliantly and entertainingly though the entire baffling process, in telling a multi-layered but finally satori-like story of how a long-forgotten punk band's song saves the world.
Based on a 2012 best-seller by Kanae Minato, his new film "Shirayuki Hime Satsujin Jiken (The Snow White Murder Case)" has the look of a conventional puzzler about how a little brown wren of an office lady (Mao Inoue) becomes the leading suspect in the murder of her gorgeously plumed romantic rival. Enter Miss Marple!
What is not conventional, however, is the important role of social media in the story, with tweet-like comments flying on the screen, no doubt giving the film's poor subtitler conniption fits. "Members of my staff in their 20s and 30s were OK with it, but my art director and other people on the team in their 50s just didn't get it," Nakamura says with a wry grin in the office of the film's distributor, Shochiku.