It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, girl has an air of mystery to her, and they go on wacky occultist adventures underscored by smooth jazz and noir sensibilities. Well, at least that’s the tale Macoto Tezka strives to tell in Tezuka’s Barbara.
Tezuka’s Barbara, adapted from Osamu Tezuka’s manga series Barbara, (which is, in itself, an adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann) is a wide-ranging epic — from romance, cults, and sex to curious people who are actually deluded projections of dogs or robots. There’s clearly a lot of ground to cover in Tezuka’s Barbara, but even with an energetic start, the fantasy of the film too often feels crammed into an ill-fitting runtime.
Yosuke Mikura (Goro Inagaki) is a famous author in Tokyo, known mostly for writing smut that sells. His world is changed forever when he discovers Barbara (Fumi Nikaido) drunkenly reciting French poetry in a crowded tunnel with a distinct brassy blonde bob. He takes her home for a drink and a shower — one in which Barbara sings at the top of her lungs with a bottle of liquor in hand — and thinks that to be the end of it.
But Barbara keeps appearing in his life under unusual circumstances. Yosuke goes shopping and decides to have a little fun in the dressing room with the cute employee, who claims she’s a fan of his work, all to find out that she’s a sentient mannequin who wants to destroy him. As if by fate, Barbara is there to rescue him.
Yosuke engages in a seemingly harmless activity, he gets accosted by weird enemies or delusions of his own ego, Barbara saves the day, and the pattern continues. They form an interesting pairing as they continue to travel in and out of each other’s strange lives — all while never being sure of what is real and what isn’t.
Tezuka’s Barbara is by all accounts a visual gem. Those familiar with the works of Wong Kar-wai will immediately recognize Christopher Doyle’s cinematography, who shot some of the lucid visual moments in Chungking Express, among other films. The introduction of Tezuka’s Barbara depicts a similar montage of the bustling city and the people in it, featuring time lapses and Doyle’s now signature smudged focus techniques. One scene in a nightclub is breathtaking, saturated in deep blues and shimmering light reflected off of sequins and jewelry.
The film’s music and production design are also standouts. Barbara’s abode is littered with speakers and office chairs, forming a tech mountain that gives off the vibe of a chic junkyard. The film’s heavy use of jazz, especially when thematically paired with Yosuke’s inner dialogue, is a welcome contrast against its ultramodern setting and gives it a real neo-noir feel.
Unfortunately, the film loses itself in its back half, which focuses on unraveling the mystery of Barbara. Throughout the film, you don’t get a great sense of who Barbara is — which helps in regards to her enigmatic characterization but it also deepens a disconnect with the audience. As the film pulls away from its central relationship and introduces cults and magic to Barbara’s backstory, it never gets to sit in its own weirdness — which is a real shame, because it can be wonderfully weird at times. While movies under two hours are breezy to watch, there is merit in taking the time to fully develop the world — especially in a film as dense and convoluted as this one. On paper, Tezuka’s Barbara is an examination of fantasy, obsession, and losing your grip on reality in an increasingly unexplainable world. But in execution, it’s a technical marvel that leaves its audience wanting just a bit more.
