Postcards from Venice

A French writer (Benoît Magimel) takes a trip to Japan, hoping to find the reclusive novelist whose violent stories have influenced his own. He meets a geisha (Lika Minamoto) who schools him in the arts of love and deception. French director Barbet Schroeder, who alternates documentaries (last year's imposing Terror's Advocate) with fiction projects (Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female), begins this one with a smart film-within-a-film — tension building to a decapitation — but the rest of Inju is a film without a film. Aiming for some of the sensual sadomasochism of his 1975 shocker Maitresse, he settles for a toe-sucking scene that earned unintended laughs at the critics' screening.