Yoshiro Nakamura is a rare bird among Japanese directors today. Though he has worked at the top of the industry, where the TV networks and Toho rule, he has so far avoided making the usual Japanese commercial film based on a hit manga, game or TV drama.
Instead he prefers to find material that interests him — the novels of Kotaro Isaka have been a particularly fruitful source — and turn it into a film that often goes beyond its mystery or thriller story line to say something about the strangeness of reality or the connectedness of everything. That is, the sort of quasi-mystical/transcendental themes that mainstream films here strenuously avoid, though Nakamura's treatment of them is anything but arty. His role model is not Andrei Tarkovsky or Robert Bresson, but M. Night Shyamalan of "The Sixth Sense" fame.
His new film, "Chonmage Purin" ("Chonmage Pudding") has plenty of strangeness in it, but of the sweetly whimsical, TV sitcom sort. It is as though Nakamura wanted to take a break from such knottily plotted, ingeniously executed films as "Golden Slumber," "Fish Story" and "Ahiru to Kamo no Koinrokka" ("The Coin Locker of the Duck and Drake"), while trying to entertain the wider audience — particularly Mom, Dad and the kids.