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| Masaki Suda in Cloud |
Cast: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masaaki Akahori, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Yugo Mikawa, Maho Yamada, Toshihiro Yashiba. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Yasayuki Sasaki. Production design: Kyoko Matsui. Film editing: Koichi Takahashi. Music: Takuma Watanabe.
A cloud is just a fog that keeps its distance. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, it's that place in cyberspace where we do and store things, but it descends upon Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) as a miasma filled with people who wish to do him harm. He has been raking in the yen as a reseller of dubious goods, buying them from distressed sellers and putting them online at marked-up prices. He has made enough money to quit his factory job and move with his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), to a place in the country, where he continues his work with the aid of a young man called Sano (Daiken Okudaira), whom he hires as an assistant. But then he starts getting mysteriously harassed and threatened, and before long he discovers that a group has formed online of people who would do him real harm. They include his former boss, a rival reseller, retailers whose goods he has bought and resold, and dissatisfied customers -- some of the products he sold were fakes. Things escalate until he is fighting for his life, aided to his surprise by Sano, whom he has fired. Cloud is a bit of a mashup: It's a satire on capitalism, an old-fashioned revenge thriller, and a moral fable, and its ending suggests that there's more going on in the background of the story than has met the eye. The film disappointed some of Kurosawa's fans, who expected more of the psychological horror for which he has become known, but I found it skillfully made and provocative.
