Monday

Once notorious for freezing the frame at the climax of a film to splash his own credit across the action, ex-actor Sabu is learning fast. Monday has exactly the same constituent parts as his three previous films - victims of circumstance, flaky yakuza, cruel humour - but it deploys them with far more control and finesse. Takagi (Tsutsumi, a Sabu regular) wakes in a hotel room one Monday morning with a packet of funeral salt in his pocket but no memory of the weekend. Gradually, flashbacks remind him of the awful truths: the exploding coffin, the sultry girl, the accidental shooting of the gangster, the police dragnet. All the funnier for being quite deliberately paced, and the elevator full of butoh dancers is just icing on the cake.