Akihiko Shiota’s first feature (1999, 100 min.), improbably based on a Japanese comic strip, is a disturbing look at a teenage boy’s sadomasochistic relationship with a 17-year-old girl he worships. At first he becomes fetishistically attached to her socks, photographs he takes of her legs, and sounds he records in her bathroom; eventually he volunteers to become her slave, which leads to cruel exploitation and diverse humiliations and traps both of them in the same compulsive games. Shiota seems uncertain whether to play this story for laughs or to treat his characters more compassionately, so the film starts wavering and wobbling toward the end, but it’s pungent and unsettling nonetheless. Interestingly, his second feature, Don’t Look Back, made the same year, took on very different material, a sensitive and unsensational story about two ten-year-old boys. (JR)