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Monzaemon Chikamatsu’s celebrated jōruri (traditional Japanese narrative music-drama) The Love Suicides at Amijima takes on a new form in director Masahiro Shinoda’s spellbinding tale of forbidden love and inexorable tragedy. Set in eighteenth-century Osaka, the film follows Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura), a married paper merchant whose obsessive love for the courtesan Koharu (Shima Iwashita) drives him towards financial ruin, social disgrace and a tragic reckoning with fate.

Opening the film backstage in a contemporary theatre, Shinoda boldly collapses the boundaries between stage and screen. All black-clad kuroko (stagehands) drift through the scenes, moving props, shadowing characters and silently guiding events towards their inevitable conclusion. With this startling theatrical device, the lovers appear less as masters of their own destiny, and more so puppets trapped within a script that has already been written.

A landmark of the Japanese New Wave, Double Suicide combines avant-garde experimentation with the emotional pull of a classical tragedy. The film would go on to win three Kinema Junpo Awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress. Featuring luminous black-and-white cinematography, surreal visual flourishes and a remarkable dual performance by Shima Iwashita as both the wife and mistress, Shinoda creates a dreamlike world suspended between reality and performance. Deepening the film’s atmosphere of longing and fatalism is Tōru Takemitsu’s evocative score, which fuses traditional theatrical elements with modernist sound textures. The result is a devastating exploration of desire, duty and the tension between human agency and forces beyond one's control.

PG | Contains sex scenes and nudity, suicide scenes and violence