In my many years of writing about film, I've only really tried to make a movie once. Foreseeing any big changes, that will be the last time I will be trying to become a director. It's hell: The actors are always on budgeted time, the crew is lazy, and the writer tends to be pretentious to the point of excruciating, likening what you're doing to his work to an anal rape from which he will never recover. I've never had a higher regard for good directors than I did during that week-long shoot. But strangely, the director in Mitsuo Yanagimachi's sublime Who's Camus Anyway? is the character that you hold in low regard.The 10 years since we've seen Yanagimachi here in the states will make for a rude awakening; where 1985's Fire Festival was brutal and brooding and Shadow of China was just plain, old bad, Who's Camus Anyway? is ferociously witty and hypnotically alert. The film depicts a collegian film crew preparing to film The Bored Murderer, a true story of a high school student who kills an elderly woman for seemingly no reason. The story's main character is said to have a close relation to Mersault, the main character in Camus' classic The Stranger. During the eight days that the film exists in, the crew prepares and shoots the film with help from their teacher, Professor Nakajo (Hirotaro Honda). The film immerses itself in every crew person, giving special attention to the director, Naoki (Shuji Kashiwabara), who must deal with an overbearing yet generous girlfriend (Hinano Yoshikawa), and his assistant director, Kiyoki (Ai Maeda), who seems to become the object of everyone's affection by the end of the eight days. There's also Ikeda (Hideo Nakaizumi), the effeminate and strange lead actor who is the catalyst for the film's chilling finale.
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