Review: 'Asako I & II' is a playful, haunting drama of love lost and regained
A cataclysm strikes almost halfway through "Asako I & II," killing the lights, rattling the walls and briefly tearing in two the fabric of this quietly entrancing Japanese drama. But the writer-director, Ryรปsuke Hamaguchi, has little interest in staging a tragic spectacle for its own sake. Instead, he cuts to the more intimate spectacle of a man and a woman embracing in wake of disaster - a mutual declaration of love that, given what we know about them by that point, feels at once sweet, beguiling, inevitable and alarming.
