Glasgow Film Festival 2015: Pale Moon
Set in the mid-1990s, not long after the burst of Japan’s economic bubble, Pale Moon follows Rika (Miyazawa), a demure housewife turned bank employee who begins an affair with a young college student (Ikematsu), the grandson of one of her wealthier elderly clients. She starts to successfully embezzle large sums of money, mostly thanks to the bank’s less than thorough practices and her sterling reputation; however, one eagle-eyed supervisor (Kobayashi) has her suspicions.
Not so much a female-led, smaller scale riff on The Wolf of Wall Street, Pale Moon instead digs into issues of conformity in Japan. Rika’s bank is revealed as a business where any breach of protocol is ignored in the hope that the next will cancel it out. Miyazawa gives a great deadpan turn, but director Yoshida’s film never really delivers much punch. It ends on a wimpish denouement related to flat childhood flashbacks, while some scattershot creative choices (soundtrack jumping from J-pop ballads to post-industrial to Christian hymns to The Velvet Underground) make its directorial intent seem unsure.