An Obsession

Shinji Ayoama's 2005 film An Obsession is a film that was inspired and partly based on Akira Kuroswa's post war masterpiece Stray Dog. Essentially there are more differences than similarities, but the main plot of the film was borrowed from Kurosawa's-a criminal takes a gun from a cop and commits murder with it. Aoyama's film is contemporary and probably more philosophical, but it also mirrors the doppelganger theme of the Kurosawa original where the protagonist and villain are similar. In Ayoama's film the similar way of thinking about life and the world is more pronounced-Kurosawa tries to show that the men have had similar life experiences and have chosen different ways of dealing with their hardships and Japan's defeat in WWII. This is a comparison that I am planning on exploring in more depth ina an academic article sometime next year. Aoyam's film has some interesting issues and themes, but it is more of an art film since he has stripped away the hard-boiled genre elements  from the original like the mentor subordinate cop buddy story and the police procedural and post war black market montages. Since I have written about Kurosawa's masterpiece twice before i was intrigued to see what Aoayama has done with the story, but it bares a pale comparison, however there's enough to merit a closer inspection.