Petrel Hotel Blue (海燕ホテル ブルー), Kôji Wakamatsu, 2012

Petrel Hotel Blue is about friends Yoji, Yukio, and Kohei attempting a vehicular robbery. Yoji never shows, Kohei flakes at the scene, and Yukio takes the fall for the failed endeavor. Years later, Yukio is freed from prison and enacts a revenge plot against Yoji. From this point, one might anticipate an unsympathetic vengeance story consistent with the Asian arthouse of the past decade, but with Wakamatsu, the intrigue is a pretense. Yukio traces Yoji to the isolated island hotel he now manages with Rika s sensual and silent woman named Rika. Reality quickly deteriorates from this desolate environment, literally a kind of primordial Nowhere replete with ominous black volcanic sand. Tensions and rivalries rise, things are said, people are killed, dreams are inhabited, space and time crumble. The catalyst of this degeneration and the cause for Yojis absence all those years ago is one and the same: Rika. And she has curves that will make you blush.