Starlit High Noon (Japan)

Written and directed by Nakagawa Yosuke (Blue Fish), the 1995 film Starlit in High Noon (a.k.a. Mahiru no Hoshizora) is a quiet and lyrical love story starring actresses Suzuki Kyoka (Blood and Bones), Kashii Yu (Linda Linda Linda), and Taiwanese-American star Leehom Wang (Lust, Caution) in his second Japanese film after Moon Child. This exquisitely shot, deliberately minimal film is in some ways an extension of Nakagawa's second work Departure which also featured the character Yukiko, played by Kyoka Suzuki in this film. Starlit in High Noon weaves quiet longing and charming performances for an uncommonly romantic gangster drama, backdropped by some truly breathtaking scenery. Japan's southern island of Okinawa has perhaps never looked so beautiful as that captured through Nakagawa's lens.

After a particularly difficult assignment, Lian Song finds himself questioning his place in the world while "decompressing" in Japan. He falls into his routine. Lian Song enjoys cooking his own gourmet meals, swimming at the local pool (where a pretty staff worker harbors a secret crush on him), and doing his laundry at the same laundromat at the same time every Friday night, when he knows he'll run into the quiet stranger he dreams about. She turns out to be Yukiko (Kyoka Suzuki of Zebraman, playing the same character played by Haru Kawazu in Nakagawa's previous film, Departure). Lian Song follows Yukiko and finds out she works in a kitchen preparing bento boxes. He occasionally buys a bento box, and finds them inedible, but when he approaches Yukiko at her job and asks about buying one, she gives him one, and this bento box turns out to be strangely delicious. Meanwhile, back in Taipei, the hitman's employers have run into trouble with a rival gang whose boss Lian Song executed. The rivals have apparently taken control of the local police department. They offer a truce, but only if Lian Song's bosses turn him over to them.

Starlit High Noon was selected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center for inclusion in the 2005 edition of New Directors/New Films.