Man, Woman and the Wall (2007)
Ricochet DVD (region 1)

d. Masashi Yamamoto; pr. Eisuke Ishige, Eiten Ishige; scr. Masashi Yamamoto; ph. Hiroshi Mikuriya; ed. Kota Tsukahara; cast. Sola Adi, Keita Ohno, Hiroto Kato (84 mins)

Have you ever lived in an apartment with paper thin walls? 

That is the predicament facing the protagonist of Man, Woman and the Wall, a sexy Japanese erotic comedy about a man who develops an obsession with his female neighbour, whose sexual exploits he can hear through the thin wall separating their apartment bedrooms.  With a digital video look, the film begins as a variation on the theme of voyeurism posed as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and indeed prevalent throughout world cinema with Krystof Kiesolwski’s A Short Film About Love. 

Although much of the film unfolds as a comedy, there is a dangerous undercurrent of sexual pathology and obsession running through the initial scenes of this disarming movie:

the protagonist begins simply by listening in but is soon so overwhelmed by his attraction to the woman next door that he is rummaging through her garbage to find out more about her, information he uses to sexually excite himself.  But, the film is not one-sided and indeed constantly inter-cuts between the man and the woman so as to give a developing portrait of their initially independent lives as they slowly begin to intersect as a result of the man’s pathological obsessions. 

In this, the film emerges as a piece of behaviourist observation.  Sounds are kept naturalistic and authentic, the absence of a traditional score contributing to the intense atmosphere sustained here, cleverly worked through the intermingling of the comedic and the pathological.  Thus, the audience is on unsure footing throughout.  Sexually explicit, but never X-rated, the film explores the inter-relationship between voyeurism, sexual desire and sexual fantasy – the protagonist masturbating as he listens to the girl next door having sex with a lover.  Nowhere near as intense a study of pathological obsession as Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, the film nevertheless emerges as a clever study in mounting obsessive paranoia, owing something even to Francis Coppola’s The Conversation.

Ultimately, however, the film becomes farcical and its humour overwhelms its study in sexual excess, emerging a pleasing light erotic comedy but little more. 

Fast-paced, it probes the sexual obsessions underlying a developing friendship and introduces a note of irony in that the more of a friend the man becomes to the woman the more is there the chance that he will no longer see her as the sexual object of his obsessions.  In this, Man, Woman and a Wall is a clever psychological assessment of sex, friendship and the emotional pressures and imaginative fantasies underlying the mystique of heterosexual attraction.