Surrealist comedy by the director of the cult film Dainipponjin could only have been made in Japan. A sad comic wakes up in a closed white room - or is he still asleep? In the meantime a Mexican wrestler prepares for an important contest.
Maybe a film like this could only be made in Japan. Only there does it seem matter of fact to combine the world of the commercial comic strip (be it manga or not) with melancholy art. Even the people who saw the cult film Dainipponjin by the same maker, will not know what to expect. Surrealism and comedy, or even slapstick. The comic, the sad clown type, is played by the film maker himself. He wakes up in a closed white room. Or maybe he is still dreaming. Strange things happen in the room and the comic dreamer doesn't have much grip on it.
Outside the room, the Mexican wrestler Escargot Man prepares for an important contest. The relationship between the man in the room and the man in the wrestling ring remains puzzling for a long time.
PROGRAMMER NOTES
Matsumoto Hitoshi is just as famous in Japan as Kitano Takeshi. They also both came to fame as half of a comic duo. Kitano used his fame and regard to make very idiosyncratic artistic and humorous films, alongside his popular Yakuza (gangster) films, like the strange Getting Any? (1995) and the no less imaginative and weird Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007).
Matsumoto seems to have skipped genre films and with this first film immediately made a very striking comic art film entitled Big Man Japan (Dainipponjin, 2007). And so now he has also made Symbol, in which the art and idiosyncrasy factors are even greater, even though there is still plenty of humour. The visual surrealism of the film is far removed from popular television, but it's also not true that this artistic extravagance by Matsumoto has nothing to do with his television humour. When Kitano in the early 1990s conquered international phone crystals, people knew from his biography that he was a famous television comic, but no one had ever seen the television programmes. Now things are different. There are more than 100 comic sketches by Matsumoto on YouTube and several of them have been subtitled in English. As a result, it is possible in a simple burlesque way to see how Matsumoto pokes fun at popular culture. As here in Go! Rangers:
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