James Cameron wasn't the only major director of the 1990s who scored a huge international hit and waited twelve years to emerge with a follow-up; Japanese director Masayuki Suo did the same following his 1995 box office sensation Shall We Dance?. Suo's much-different sophomore effort, the dark, earnest drama I Just Didn't Do It, emerged in 2007. A four-barreled excoriation of the Japanese legal system - slamming its hypocrisies and its weaknesses - the film concerns Teppei Kaneko (Ryo Kase of Letters from Iwo Jima), a man en route to his premier job interview on a crowded Tokyo train when he's unjustly accused of groping a Japanese schoolgirl. The court system tries to encourage him to plead guilty, but he passionately insists on his own innocence, which plunges him into a Kafkaesque black hole of bureaucratic suffering - endless interviews with police and attorneys, periods of incarceration, hearings, and other indignities. At the last minute, it appears that fate has dealt Teppei an encouraging hand, once he inherits an enthusiastic, skilled defense attorney - but alas, that attorney hands the case to a female junior partner (Asaka Seto) who believes in Teppei's guilt and refuses to be convinced otherwise.
by Nathan Southern
synopsis
