Kimono Review
After casting his wife, Miho_Nikaido, in a few small roles, writer-director Hal_Hartley crafted this elliptical, almost fetishistic short feature, devoted to her in almost every sense of the word. Deliberately opaque, surreal, and sensual, the nearly wordless Kimono may at first seem a major departure for a filmmaker who made his name as a wry chronicler of talky Long Islanders, and it's true that the film doesn't play to Hartley's strengths. But as arranged by the director and shot by Sarah_Cawley, the film traffics in the same stilted physical language at play in such absurdist Hartley works as Surviving_Desire and Simple_Men: a sort of anti-ballet where characters walk through doors, round corners, and go nowhere in particular. More troublesome, however, is Kimono's emphasis on the "Orientalism" of its characters and situations. Hartley seems to be asserting that Nikaido's character needs to be transported back to a time of Asian tradition and ritual to be truly free, a thesis that takes on creepy intimations when one considers that the person who thought it up is the leading actress' Western husband. As super-obscure vanity projects go, Kimono is a decent one -- just don't expect it to have too much resonance for audiences other than Mr. and Mrs. Hartley. Michael Hastings, Rovi
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