Screwed - Teruo Ishii 1998

Adapted from a comic by Yoshiharu Tsuge who penned the screenplay, “Screwed (aka Screw Style, originally Neji-shiki)” is a deliberately paced, typically Japanese fever dream starring the always reliable Tadanobu Asano as a down-on-luck manga artist, Tsube. The stark similarity between the writer’s and the protagonist’s names indicates that the film might contain semi-autobiographical elements, but then again it could only be a trick. Faced with “petty” existential problems, the confused Tsube has plenty of ideas, but he struggles to put them together, as he confesses after an imposing prologue of hellish, Zulawskian orgies which “crib” the color palette from the openings of Shrader’s “Cat People” and Stanley’s “Hardware”. He depends on his girlfriend Kuniko (Miki Fujitani), but seems emotionally detached from both her and the rest of the world. However, when he learns that she is pregnant with another man, he tries to commit suicide with the handfull of sleeping pills, ending up in the hospital