An interesting story about two men and their wives gets started, then events rush on in an ever more dreamlike way, until the characters lose focus and the story trails off into a mystifying combination of reality and dream, fantasy, hallucination. You get the idea that something strange is happening, that a puzzle is being set up, but the events themselves, even the oblique sex, become dull because so disconnected. Wondering what's happening interferes with your involvement. Some events, like the would-be samurai succeeding, being idolized by his men, and stopping at the brothel where his wife is now working as a prostitute, seem implausible though real. Implausibility and hallucination both detach the viewer from the characters. You can't enter into their point of view very intensely because the filmmaker is playing this game and because the story moment by moment loses its orginally involving reality. The peasant suddenly loved by the aristocratic beauty can be a powerful line, as in, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream. But here it was too schematic to have much punch. An overrated film.
