THE GEISHA HOUSE: Fukasaku's girls are like manga heroines come to life. TOEI

Japanese director Takashi Ishii cut an odd figure at the premiere of his latest film, The Black Angel, Vol. 2. Onstage before the highly anticipated screening (tickets reportedly sold out in an hour), four actors and two actresses stood ranked like a forest of Comme des Garcons models--tall, icily coiffed, clad head-to-toe in black. The diminutive director, himself all in black, threw off the clean lines of the assemblage. But he was even more disruptive when taking questions after the film had unspooled. To one viewer's complaint that the glossy, mindless thriller was unconvincing, Ishii agreed. "I thought I was just making an entertaining action movie--something that might even go straight to the video shop," he said. "There are movies meant for film festivals, and then there are movies that are only meant to be consumed."

Fine, except Ishii's film was being screened as part of last week's Tokyo International Film Festival. And his tone of gloomy self-abnegation colored much of the rest of the fest as well. Japan's commercial cinemas have fared unusually well amid the current recession, with distribution revenue up 23% over the first half of 1998 (buoyed in large part by the success of last year's TIFF opener, Titanic, which has grossed more than $175 million in Japan). But the lack of any equally high-wattage event--and severe cutbacks in funding--produced a notably subdued festival this year. The slate of new Japanese films in particular generated few plaudits. The fest's true pleasures were quiet ones shot farther afield in Asia, films whose charms might have been lost in the klieg lights of more glamorous years.

Ishii's flashy Black Angel measures how far short Japan's entries fell this year. Its heroine--sleek, statuesque Yuki Amami--sleeps in a luxuriously austere apartment, with only a bottle of whiskey, a shiny cell-phone and an even shinier gun by her side. Ishii shoots her like a cartoon figure: when she drinks, her swigs rumble like an avalanche; when she fights, her every motion is exaggerated, with grand tumbles frozen frame-by-frame. The conceit is matched by the overdone plot, in which a botched hit reunites her with a long-lost yakuza love and sets off a bloody chain-reaction involving a distraught florist and an army of Armani-clad gangsters. Ishii's melodrama, however, lacks heart. While the actors go through the stylized motions--feigning anger, grief, anomie--their passions are too clinical to flesh out the comic-book dimensions the director has drawn them.

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