The mind-bending melancholy of ‘Lust in the Rain’

The phenomenon of life review in the face of imminent death is well known, if resistant to scientific explanation: How do you conduct experiments on falling mountain climbers or expiring ER patients?

Something similar occurs in Shinzo Katayama’s “Lust in the Rain” when soldier-protagonist Yoshio (Ryo Narita) is shot in wartime China and sees his past flash by like a surreal highlight reel.

But this phantasmagoric romantic drama, which is based on four stories by manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge, so thoroughly obliterates the divide between past and present, waking and dreaming (or hallucinating) that defining Yoshio’s baseline reality becomes hard — and pointless. When Yoshio tells his free-spirited lover Fukuko (Eriko Nakamura) that she “goes with the flow,” I thought it good advice for enjoying this meandering, mesmerizing movie.

Although Tsuge’s work is reflected in the film’s melancholy, introspective mood, Katayama and his collaborators charge up the visuals with everything from green and red lighting that evokes an erotic fantasy world to night shots of an illuminated white castle that looks like the lair of a Bond villain.

The story begins with a dream sequence taken from a Tsuge story that gives the film its title. At a countryside bus stop, a man (Narita) talks a strange woman into stripping in the midst of a driving rainstorm — the metal on her clothes will attract lightning, he tells her — and proceeds to rape her.

This disturbing scene abruptly shifts to an idyllic shot of the pair naked in front of a spectacular waterfall. Then the dreamer, Yoshio, awakes in early postwar Japan. The film later reenters his erotically charged dreamworld, if not with the same jarring impact as the first visit. A struggling manga artist, Yoshio encounters a newly widowed Fukuko while helping his cranky old landlord (Naoto Takenaka) move her out of her house.

He is attracted to this casually seductive woman, but soon learns she already has another man, a cagey would-be novelist named Imori (Go Morita) who ropes Yoshio into a dubious sales scheme. When the scheme falls through, Yoshio puts the now desperate couple up in his tiny apartment and spies on them as they make noisy love.

These opening scenes play like dark comedy and suggest why Tsuge is often compared to American comic artist Robert Crumb, who similarly mixes sex and twisted humor with an uninhibited imagination.

But the story takes us through more mind-bending changes with the same cast of main characters in different guises. In one narrative arc, Yoshio is a wounded soldier who is in love with Fukuko, now a sex worker in a military brothel, while Imori has morphed into a solicitous comrade and the landlord into a gruff army surgeon.

The temptation is to say, as we do when Dorothy wakes up after her trip to Oz, that the protagonist is simply dreaming a possible future, but Yoshio’s journey through time and psychic states defies pat explanations. Instead of “The Wizard of Oz,” Katayama seems more influenced by “Mulholland Drive,” the David Lynch masterpiece that undermines assumptions about not only what we are seeing on screen, but also reality itself.Overlong and rambling, “Lust in the Rain” doesn’t reach that exalted height. But in the boldness and scale of its vision, it stands out from the crowd of cautious, small-minded local movies. To paraphrase William Blake: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom — and one baffling, stunning film.