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.
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