A weak film with a few high points, first among them the opening: A busy, sun-bathed downtown-ish sidewalk, no sky, no shadows of significance, no cars, just the passing crowd. Passing eyes, because the scene is about hiding. A man, who turns out later to be a kid, as they all are except the doctor and detective, ducks out of a shop and walks, carrying something messily wrapped in plastic. It's shorter and fatter than a bed pillow. Here, you might take it for a scavenger's cache or a homeless person's portable home. Just before the film's title rolls, the young man pauses to look through a slit in the bundle. Impossibly, a live human eye looks back. Up to this point, the film's silent, Keatonesque, wonderful.
The chain-smoking woman doctor, with patients crowding each other's time, is the film's most intriguing character. She seems to have her own story, just out of view. (Think perhaps of the nurse in Teshigahara's Tanin no kao. I might have told the story from her point of view, leaving her apparent disinterest intact so that she doesn't mirror the hyper-involved researchers in the Ring films. In Tomie, she's present only to trigger point-of-view girl Tsukiko's dream sequences.
A word about translation. If you find this at all here, it's likely to be on a Chinese DVD with Chinese and English subtitle options. A couple of times in Tomie the English was so poor, as if a translation not of the Japanese soundtrack but of the Chinese translation, that I had to replay over and over trying and mostly failing to draw back enough of my extremely meager Japanese to figure out what the fractured English subtitle was trying to say. The first card the doctor holds up, by the way, simply says "Tomie" twice, once in katakana and once, below that, in hiragana. The doctor's trying to get Tomie to respond to her own name.
The chain-smoking woman doctor, with patients crowding each other's time, is the film's most intriguing character. She seems to have her own story, just out of view. (Think perhaps of the nurse in Teshigahara's Tanin no kao. I might have told the story from her point of view, leaving her apparent disinterest intact so that she doesn't mirror the hyper-involved researchers in the Ring films. In Tomie, she's present only to trigger point-of-view girl Tsukiko's dream sequences.
A word about translation. If you find this at all here, it's likely to be on a Chinese DVD with Chinese and English subtitle options. A couple of times in Tomie the English was so poor, as if a translation not of the Japanese soundtrack but of the Chinese translation, that I had to replay over and over trying and mostly failing to draw back enough of my extremely meager Japanese to figure out what the fractured English subtitle was trying to say. The first card the doctor holds up, by the way, simply says "Tomie" twice, once in katakana and once, below that, in hiragana. The doctor's trying to get Tomie to respond to her own name.