Kitami

Notorious for clearing cinemas at festival screenings, Sato's gay s/m weird-out is a direct to video title in Britain. Ryuzaki gets involved with Yukihiro Kitami without realising that his lover is a big-time sadist; he ends the relationship by slashing off Kitami's left arm with (what else?) a samurai sword. One year later, while scouring Tokyo for a multi-system video player to watch his Pasolini tapes, he's invited back to the 'secret theatre' where he first met Kitami. Simultaneously earnest and blackly comic, Sato's film seems less interested in either sadism or masochism as such than in the even more specialised tradition of louche psycho-drama.