Macoto Tezka is always going to be in the shadow of his father, the great "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka. Though he's directed his own original films, much of Macoto's career has been in releasing and adapting his dad's work. His latest such adaptation, Tezuka's Barbara, is a live-action feature film based on one Osamu Tezuka's darkest and most sexually explicit manga, the 1973-74 serial Barbara, itself loosely based on the opera The Tale of Hoffman. Let's leave the Freudians to explain just why this was the story Macoto chose to adapt.
The titular Barbara is a muse, possibly an evil one (or maybe she's just being controlled by her evil mother's Satanic cult). She's the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl. Yosuke Mikura, an erotic writer striving for respectability, picks her up off the street and becomes infatuated with her, even as she might be destroying him. Yosuke's grip on reality might not be the strongest, and the sheer strangeness of his psychosexual escapades guarantees that, at the very least, the film doesn't get boring.
Tezuka's Barbara looks and sounds great. Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer behind many of Wong Kar-Wai's most beautiful films, sure knows how to make wandering through dark cityscapes look cool as hell. The jazzy piano score by Ichiko Hashimoto makes for a perfect accompaniment, expertly navigating between tones of seduction, sadness and stark horror.
Where the film doesn't work so well is in the acting. Fumi Nikaido is fine in the title role, though she's playing more an abstraction than a real character, but former boy band idol Goro Inagaki is not a good fit for Yosuke at all. The twisted pulpy tone of the material and the complicated psychology of the character demand an actor who can teeter on the edge of absurdity and frightening intensity, the Japanese equivalent of a Jake Gyllenhaal, Jim Carrey or even a Nicolas Cage. Goro Inagaki just isn't up to the task.
A trippy hard-R movie involving sex cults, bestiality and necrophilia is naturally gonna have a limited audience. For connoisseurs of messed up exploitation cinema, Tezuka's Barbara has enough strangeness and style to be worth a watch, but it's also a mild disappointment. You might be better off just reading the manga, where you don't have to deal with mediocre performances.
Tezuka's Barbara will have an encore streaming presentation on August 28 at 5PM ET as part of Fantasia Festival 2020 (available only in Canada). It will be released in Japanese theaters on November 20.