Trance

Synopsis

When a chance meeting reunites three old school friends, now making their living as a struggling writer, a psychiatrist, and a drag artist, they are all too eager to get reacquainted. But as the stories they tell each other become more and more surreal - from unrequited passions and split personalities to male eunuchs and escaped Japanese Emperors - they start to question their own and each other's sanity, with hilarious consequences. Shot through with Shoji Kokami's trademark wit, ingenuity and wicked humour, Trance is a story of three solitary individuals, their quest for live, and the true meaning of their existence.

Our Review:

11 June 2007

When Scarlett Johansson hooked up with Bill Murray in Tokyo, she was well and truly “lost in translation”. The same could be said of the Bush reaching out towards a 1993 Japanese hit comedy by Shoji Kokami that titillates for a short while but fails to find any real point of contact.

If anything, Trance’s slight story of three old school friends meeting up by chance and proceeding to search for “the true meaning of existence in the modern world” has echoes of certain surrealist European plays; you never feel, while watching Kokami’s own antiseptic production, that you are learning anything at all about life in contemporary Japan.

The madhouse mood is set by Bob Bailey’s all-white design of mobile screens and four large cubes. Reiko (Meredith MacNeill) is a psychiatrist who is trapped in a relationship with a married man. Masa (Stephen Darcy) is a severely delusional freelance writer torn with guilt about promoting himself and lurching into ...

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