The Rain Women

Shinobi Yaguchi is known for his anarchistic comedies and made his debut in 1990 with the wonderfully melancholy The Rain Women. The first part ("Rain") is fanciful and carefree, showing two women sharing an apartment, racing through a convenience store on bikes, wearing out numerous umbrellas by scrambling through soggy landscapes and sharing a teeth-cleaning scene that feels like the longest in film history. In the second part ("Sunshine"), they perform "Singin' in the Rain" as a popular J-pop duo, separate, experience personal tragedies. Blood replaces water as a metaphor. A bicycle burns, another shrivels up. At the very end, the rain luckily begins to fall once again.