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Shinji Sōmai

Shinji Sōmai

Directing

Biography

Shinji Sōmai (相米 慎二, Sōmai Shinji, 13 January 1948 – 9 September 2001) was a Japanese film director. He was born in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, and was brought up in Hokkaido. Somai began his career in 1975 as an assistant director with Nikkatsu Co., one of Japan's leading film production companies, after he dropped out of Chuo University. Somai made made his debut as a director in 1980 with The Terrible Couple - an adaptation of a popular boys' manga of the time. The film deals with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, presaging a long thread of Somai works in which young people are called upon to test their capabilities while discovering the unreliable nature of adult society. In Somai's hands, children and teenagers are always treated and presented sympathetically and seriously. An actor's director from the start, Somai's trademark was a use of long takes, usually involving constantly-moving and spectacularly sweeping shots, which he felt allowed his cast to achieve the proper mood for scenes which would have been ruined by excessively quick editing. Perhaps the most extraordinary use of this technique is to be found in his 1985 film Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion (one of three of his films released that year), in which Somai uses an apparently single fourteen-minute take to reveal a succession of significant events in one character's childhood. The best of Somai's films often straddle genres, taking off in unpredictable directions toward stimulating destinations. Somai directed 13 films between 1980 and 2000. He died of lung cancer at 53.

Known For

Lesbian World: Fondling
4.6

Naomi, who runs a boutique, is a lesbian and has been having homosexual relationships with her staff, Reiko, and a married woman, Miyako. Her friend Mari, a singer, is also a lesbian, and this is a complicated love story between two women that begins when Reiko falls in love with her one-sidedly.

Lesbian World: Fondling

1975
The Man Who Stole the Sun
7.3

A high school science teacher is the butt of all his students' jokes, until their bus is hijacked on a school trip. But something more sinister lurks beneath the surface: he's building an atomic bomb in his apartment.

The Man Who Stole the Sun

1979
Love Hotel
6.8

A call-girl named Yumi and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion.

Love Hotel

1985
Typhoon Club
6.5

Offering a caustic immersion into the lives of disaffected junior high students on the cusp of adulthood, the film takes place over the 5-day period before, during, and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which six of the students endure while marooned in their school.

Typhoon Club

1985
The Youth Killer
6.5

Though his parents help him run the family business, Jun still feels persecuted by their love; when they bar him from meeting with his girlfriend, tensions increase.

The Youth Killer

1976
Sailor Suit and Machine Gun
7.1

A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun

1981
Wait and See
7.3

A salaryman faces a major life change as his firm undergoes financial difficulties. To add to his troubles, a man claiming to be his long-estranged father shows up at his house requesting shelter. One of the best of Somai's seriocomic studies of the messiness of family life.

Wait and See

1998
Tokyo Heaven
7.1

A pampered young model is killed in a traffic accident. Given the chance to return to earth, she becomes involved with the advertising executive who is trying to cover up her death. A blend of fantasy and trenchant realism in which Somai uses the ethereal glow of advertising images to comment on the transience of life.

Tokyo Heaven

1990
P. P. Rider
6.0

Three high-school students tangle with indulgent yakuza and lackadaisical police as they set out in search of the class bully, who has been kidnapped.

P. P. Rider

1983
The Friends
7.2

A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. The boys form a bond with the recluse and set about weeding and replanting the garden.

The Friends

1994
Moving
7.5

Physically separated from her father and at odds with her distraught mother, a girl must negotiate her own passage to maturity.

Moving

1993
Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion
6.9

Iori, taken from an orphanage by a family for domestic work, runs away and is adopted and raised by two young men. Ten years later, she crosses paths with her former step-sister, who is soon poisoned to death, Iori being the prime suspect.

Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion

1985
Dreamy Fifteen
6.2

Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrolls in a prestigious high school in Tokyo. Plans are made for him to live in his uncle's house, part of which is rented out while his uncle is abroad on business. A realtor's mistakes leaves Tasiro sharing the house with Kei Yamaba, the most beautiful girl in the school, who is also his classmate. There is the risk that their unexpected 'co-habitation' will be discovered by the school authorities.

Dreamy Fifteen

1980
The Catch
6.5

A young man tries to overcome the hostility of his girlfriend's father, a tuna fisherman, by getting the father to teach him the trade's secrets.

The Catch

1983
Kaza-hana
5.6

A government employee meets a hostess of a "pink club," and together they set out on a journey.

Kaza-hana

2001
Almost Transparent Blue
6.5

In the mid-1970s, a small group of friends are living in a Japanese town near an American air force base, their lives revolve around sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. The near-plotless story weaves a vividly raw, image-intensive journey through the daily monotony of drug-induced hallucinations, vicious acts of violence, overdoses, suicide, and group sex.

Almost Transparent Blue

1979
Grass Labyrinth
7.2

Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.

Grass Labyrinth

1979
Luminous Woman
7.0

A hulking man from the country pursues his beloved to the underworld of Tokyo nightclubs, where he finds work as a sideshow wrestler and becomes involved with a faded opera singer.

Luminous Woman

1987
Hostess Confidential: Three Juicy Sisters
8.0

This comedic piece centers on a trio of sisters—Rei Okamoto, Nahomi Oka, and Tamaki Katsura—whose personalities are nothing if not intense. Working as hostesses, they put their bodies on the line to make money, ultimately rising to the top by capitalizing on a very particular "special talent."

Hostess Confidential: Three Juicy Sisters

1975
Late Bloom: Campus Erotica
8.0

No description available.

Late Bloom: Campus Erotica

1976