With his black suit, ever-present sunglasses and air of entitlement, hit novelist Yosuke Mikura (Goro Inagaki) comes across like a cut-price Marcello Mastroianni. Women swoon wherever he goes, but a ginger-haired, poetry-quoting vagrant he finds slumped in an underpass is more to his tastes.

That would be Barbara (Fumi Nikaido): a booze-guzzling manic pixie dream girl, literary muse, sex object, sorceress or all of the above. First conceived by manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka during his edgy early-1970s period, she’s been brought to the screen by the artist’s son, Macoto Tezka.

Given the sexually explicit nature of the manga, it must have been an awkward undertaking, like having to catalog your father’s erotic art collection. But whereas another director might have had the confidence to do something reckless with “Barbara,” Tezka’s adaptation is a more dutiful affair.