With his black suit, ever-present sunglasses and air of entitlement, hit novelist Yosuke Mikura (Goro Inagaki) comes across like a cut-price Marcello Mastroianni. Women swoon wherever he goes, but a ginger-haired, poetry-quoting vagrant he finds slumped in an underpass is more to his tastes.
That would be Barbara (Fumi Nikaido): a booze-guzzling manic pixie dream girl, literary muse, sex object, sorceress or all of the above. First conceived by manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka during his edgy early-1970s period, she¡¯s been brought to the screen by the artist¡¯s son, Macoto Tezka.
Given the sexually explicit nature of the manga, it must have been an awkward undertaking, like having to catalog your father¡¯s erotic art collection. But whereas another director might have had the confidence to do something reckless with ¡°Barbara,¡± Tezka¡¯s adaptation is a more dutiful affair.
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