Double Suicide and the 'fetishism of space'

Published in Senses of Cinema, Issue 59 (2011). It is rare today to find a film as highly stylised as Shinju: Ten no amijima (Double Suicide)" especially one in which the stylisation is so exquisitely sustained across every level of set design, performance, sound and dramaturgy. Based on a bunraku theatre script written by the most famous premodern Japanese dramatist, Monzaemon Chikamatsu, Double Suicide is a period film set among the merchant class of Osaka. The inability of a merchant, Jihei, to pay out the debts of his lover, the courtesan, Koharu, leads to their decision to seek a shinju" a lovers' suicide" so they can be together in the next world.