Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's Emotion is a four-dimensional, maybe-Dracula love/lust story of Oedipal anxieties. Joycean in complexity, it's a Japanese story borrowed from Europe, translated into English, then re-translated back into Japanese. Ôbayashi seems more interested in testing the durability of cinema's plasticity than in telling a "story" about "characters." If anything, the Dracula character is a red herring used to lure the audience into a state of complicity for Ôbayashi's filmic gymnastics. There are many shots that stuck with me: a Japanese Dracula swallowed in fog and bubbles; two young women frolicking in a forest with the camera flipped upside-down so it appears they're cavorting on the frame's ceiling; a man lying on his back in a pile of hay with a banana squirting its way out of his mouth.
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