AllMovie

Clever and slick, Kenji Uchida's impressive debut, A Stranger of Mine, clearly owes a debt to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Uchida engages in a similar kind of temporal trickery, backtracking to the beginning of his story again and again, and gradually revealing the hidden motivations of his characters. Uchida seems to genuinely care for his characters, however, and presents their tale with a refreshing lack of cynicism. While his script is impressively tight, and the film is shot with a masterful command of both on and offscreen space, and razor-sharp comic timing, there's never a sense that these characters are merely pawns in Uchida's well-played game. While the story is told from several points-of-view, from the hopeless, dejected Maki's (Reika Kirishima) to the mercenary pragmatism of the financially strapped yakuza boss, Asai (Kisuke Yamashita), Uchida seems to take the generous, hopeful, perhaps slightly naïve perspective of Miyata (Yasuhi Nakamura) to heart, and this gives the entire film a light, poppy air that is immensely enjoyable. Nakamura's physical presence, with his oversized head on a scrawny body and the irrepressible openness of his facial expressions makes a wonderful contrast to both Kirishima's inconsolable dourness and Sô Yamanaka's cynical hipsterism as his best friend, Kanda. Slyly mixing in elements from other genres, A Stranger of Mine is the rare romantic comedy that improves on repeated viewings. It's the brashly confident debut of a filmmaker who has already developed a distinctive style.