Two to Tangle

Written for an Arbelos Films Blu-Ray in 2024.

Two to Tangle
By Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of the most striking attributes of experimental art is the way it commonly forces us to rethink certain basics that we normally take for granted. In Nobuhiro Suwa’s 2/Duo (1996), the filmmaker’s first foray into fiction after making several TV documentaries, the vicissitudes of a young couple trying to live together — an unsuccessful actor named Kei (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and a boutique shop assistant named Yu (Eri Yu) — are so unfixed that even so seemingly simple a matter as what causes their rifts isn’t clearly spelled out. Their scenes together are vivid and sometimes violent, but seldom legible in the terms we normally accept from narrative fiction.

In an early scene, Kei suddenly proposes marriage to Yu, and she seems too startled by this suggestion to respond. In a subsequent scene, an offscreen interviewer (Is it Suwa or someone else? Does it matter?) asks her character why she didn’t respond, and she promises to ask Kei why he proposed to her. But when she finally does this, he can only shout, like a beleaguered Hamlet, “I don’t know!” Indeed, lack of certainty becomes the only certainty in much of what follows. Read more