One Paragraph Movie Review: Floating Weeds

One hundred and fifty-third film: Floating Weeds, an intensely boring but gorgeous-looking Japanese film about the lives of an itinerant theatre troupe from 1959. It’s pretty telling when the best and most interesting thing about a film by a factor of many thousands is the fabrics in it. But fabrics don’t take two hours to tell a fifteen minute story. Fabrics don’t make every piece of dialogue awkward by getting actors to stand squarely in front of the camera and stare into it. Fabrics don’t repeat lines over and over and make the sex worker we’re supposed to think is ‘the ugly one’ scratch her arse as a character trait. And fabrics don’t make kissing and interpersonal relationships seem like an unpleasant bit of admin. Good old fabrics, eh? One constantly refreshed cup of sake out of five.