TEZUKA’S BARBARA
Tokyo Drifters
RELEASED 28 JUNE
2019 | 18 | Blu-ray & DVD (dual form)
Director Macoto Tezuka
Cast Goro Inagaki, Fumi Nikaido,
Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Shizuka Ishibashi
It took “Father of Manga” Osamu Tezuka’s own son to bring his provocative, taboo-spiced 1973 manga Barbara to the screen.
A Tokyo-set reimagining of The Tales Of Hoffman, this once considered “unfilmable” tale sees a successful but artistically stymied novelist encounter a drunken girl in the subway. Soon this mesmerising stranger has infiltrated his life. Is she an urban muse? A goddess? Or something altogether deadlier?
Macoto Tezuka’s film favours mood over answers, conjuring a sense of numb, jazz-scored cool that brushes against the occult while flirting with questions of obsession and inspiration. A startling early scene serves up a surreal decapitation: nothing quite recaptures its reality-warping jolt. As Goro Inagaki’s novelist becomes ever more dissipated under Barbara’s influence the film itself starts to haemorrhage energy, ultimately content to play out in a kind of doomy swoon.
But as Barbara, Fumi Nikaido is genuinely bewitching. As she floats through the city, the camera is clearly as smitten as the novelist.
Extras Behind-the-scenes featurette (30 minutes); interviews with the director, both leads and cinematographer Christopher Doyle; deleted scenes and alternate ending (six minutes).
Nick Setchfield
In 1965, Stanley Kubrick wrote to Tezuka asking him to be art director on 2001: A Space Odyssey. He had to decline.