I really hate it when movies disappoint me. Koreyoshi Kurahara's I Am Waiting should have been a masterpiece. The first 45 minutes are so compelling, so beautiful, and so tragic that if it had been an American film, it would have been remembered as one of the great film noir. It opens with Jôji, an ex-boxer, who saves Saeko, a young hostess from committing suicide. She is on the run from the mob who had hired her as a nightclub singer but apparently tried to force her to work as a prostitute. Together, they work in Jôji's restaurant, a home for wayward souls, and begin to heal each others' broken lives. But, of course, the mob finds Saeko and forces her to come back to them. But then the film does a curious about face and changes from a moody romance noir into a crime drama. Apparently, Jôji's brother was murdered by the same gangsters who hired Saeko. He had been on his way to Brazil to buy some farmland so he and Jôji could start a new life. But the mob picked him out as an easy target, took his money, and killed him. So for the last half of the film, it becomes almost solely focused on Jôji's quest for revenge against the gangsters who ruined his chance for a new life. Saeko becomes less than an ancillary character. It just seems so dishonest, so disingenuous that it makes me almost resent the film. This should have been a film about two lost people finding each other and trying to escape from the mob. Oh well...I can dream...
7/10
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