Japan Japan 2007

Director: Lior Shamriz
Scenario: Lior Shamriz
Genre: Drama
Country: Israel, Germany, USA
Year: 2007
Duration: 65 min

 

Actors: Imri Kahn, Amnon Friedman, Irit Gidron, Pnina Grietzer, Chloe Griffin, Avishag Leibovitz, Tal Meiri, Naama Yuria, Benny Ziffer

Description:
Japan Japan
(Israel)
By Ronnie Scheib
A Jehuti Films production. Produced, directed, written, edited by Lior Shamriz. Camera (color, DV), Shamriz.
With: Imri Kahn, Tal Meiri, Irit Gidron, Neema Yuria, Amnon Friedman, Benny Ziffer.
In this latest DV-shot exercise in gay teen angst, the naked 19-year-old hero proclaims, “Cinema is dead,” before sullenly parading his disaffection throughout Tel Aviv. Like many post-”Tarnation” navel-gazing wallows (a new fest staple), “Japan Japan” equates alienation with narrative deconstruction. What is left, in Israeli helmer Lior Shamriz’s debut feature, is a quasi-docu homemovie, digitally manipulated and aggressively punctuated with pornographic inserts from an alternate image system, namely cyberspace. Sixty-five-minute experimental walkabout has cultivated considerable fest exposure.
Pic traces the arrival of Imri (Imri Kahn) in the big city, having summarily left the army, his status, like the entire explosive Israeli situation, consigned to the movie’s off-space. Instead, Shamriz records Imri’s interactions with his flaky female flatmate, his nothing job in a party-supply store, his sexual liaisons for love or money and his shared perambulations with best friend Neema (Neema Yuria). These non-events fuel his burning desire to go elsewhere, specifically Japan, the source of a particularly graphic sequence of masturbating men slathering a shower mate with ectoplasmic semen. Between the drabness of Imri’s day-to-day existence and the Internet-imported sexcapades, Shamriz supplies no exit strategy.
Reviewed at Walter Reade Theater, New York, March 17, 2008. (In New Directors/New Films.) Hebrew dialogue. Running time: 65 MIN.

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