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Tetsuya Nakashima follows up his exuberant Kamikaze Girls with this brilliantly executed musical tearjerker, which won star Miki Nakatani (Chaos) a slew of well-deserved acting awards in Japan, and which received the Audience Award at Subway Cinema's 2007 New York Asian Film Festival, where it had its North American premiere. While its subject matter may evoke the abused but dignified women of Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi, the style of Memories of Matsuko combines the luridly hued melodrama of Douglas Sirk with extravagant musical numbers that fall somewhere between Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! and Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, but with a humanist slant that only deepens the film's tragic overtones. The songs are surprisingly strong, and the director's CGI-enhanced visual extravagance is laced with a generous wit. As he proved with Kamikaze Girls, Nakashima is, first and foremost, an entertainer, so he makes his doomed heroine wholly sympathetic. She makes some dismal choices in the film, and thus shares responsibility in her fate, but her motivations are always clear, and the longing that drives her is a universal one. The blue-tinted prison number is one of the best parts of the film, and highlights Nakashima's greater theme of empathy. Again and again, characters misjudge one another with tragic results, while audience surrogate Sho (Eita) eventually gets to hear the whole story, enabling him to overcome his own solipsistic self-pity. Memories of Matsuka presents a beautifully and imaginatively rendered, but spiritually cold and ugly world, and finds a glimmer of hope in empathy and understanding. In adapting Muneki Yamada's novel, Nakashima has come up with something surprisingly fresh that further solidifies his reputation as a unique cinematic talent.