Desert moon: 月の砂漠

Nagai and Cheekie in front of the river bank

Mister Nagai is a successful man. As one of the first japanese to have created a start-up at the beginning of the dot com era, not only did he went public, he even put his company in a foreign stock in Singapore. But going public brings its own set of difficulties. The stockholders put an insane pressure on Nagai, who in the dawn of the coming crisis doesn’t know how to make ends meet .

Busy Nagai

After a television interview, he will find Keechie, a gigolo surviving by selling himself to rich and frustrated wives. Nagai will ask him to seduce his wife, that has left him with his daughter, for neglecting family. But Keechie will not stop just there, because of his own traumatic family experience, he wants to show Nagai where he is wrong. This is the starting point of a weird story with nonetheless credible family problems and true humans.

Akira pays Cheekie for his services

Critic:

Desert Moon is definitively the kind of story that I really like. Not much action, even though this film felt relatively fast paced, gives the time to really appreciate the actors and the characters they are playing. The film has social critic components, lack of affection within the family or pressure in work environment, but at no point it felt start to make moral judgement and doesn’t sacrifice story and artistic development for the sake of a to heavy social criticism. The film at points really felt weird, surrealistic. One doesn’t understand the motivation for people  behaving the way they do. But through that disruption of the expectable, the human nature of all the protagonists gets highlighted. Moreover, at no point the film takes the easy way out and keeps surprising the audience.

Akira and her daughter Kaai