Based on a novel by Kazuki Sakuraba, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's "Watashi no Otoko (My Man)" is described as a film about forbidden love, which immediately raises the question of what, if anything, is "forbidden" in this day and age.
In Kumakiri's other films — such as last year's "Natsu no Owari (Summer's End)," with its classic love-triangle story, and 2010's "Kaitanshi Jokei (Sketches of Kaitan City)," with its characters on the edge of ruin, violence or death — the director examines people living on the margins of society and at emotional extremes. This time, however, he has found a story that truly lives up to its "taboo" hype: A middle-aged man (Tadanobu Asano) makes a lover of the orphaned girl (Fumi Nikaido) he has been raising as a daughter.
Another example of the passions such a pairing can arouse is Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita," a 1962 film based on Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel that depicts a mature man's infatuation with a pubescent girl (aged 12 in the novel and 14 in the movie). The film left out nearly all the novel's eroticism to appease the censors (though the ones in the U.K. still gave the film an X rating). Given the climate today, it's hard to imagine anyone venturing a remake.