It was a surprise that Suo Masayuki made nothing for ten years after Shall We Dance?, his hit comedy-drama about the closeted world of Japanese ballroom dancing. Even more surprising, he has broken his long silence with this angry, impassioned drama about the structural weaknesses and blatant hypocrisy of Japan’s legal system. Kaneko Teppei (Kase Ryo, Letters from Iwo Jima) is travelling to his first job interview on a crowded Tokyo train when he’s accused of groping a schoolgirl. The system urges him to confess and have done with it, but he protests his innocence--and plunges into a months-long nightmare of imprisonment, court hearings, adjournments, re-enactments and interviews with lawyers and cops. Luckily for him, the charismatic defence attorney Arakawa (Yakusho Koji) takes an interest in the case. But Arakawa assigns it to a woman junior (Seto Asaka) who--like the system itself--presumes Kaneko’s guilt.

There are no Perry Mason-style twists or courtroom dramatics here, just a sober, gripping account of the way a system perpetuates itself--a system, that is, without juries, in which judges are promoted on the basis of the number of "guilty" verdicts they reach. Anyone baffled by recent Japanese court judgments in cases involving foreigners will find many of their questions answered here.

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