I think of Japanese filmmaker Masashi Yamamoto as a surrealist, but he likes to call himself a liar. "For me," he told an interviewer for insite-Tokyo.com, "the whole filmmaking process is a bunch of lies, and I feel as though what I'm doing is moving within it, among it, playing in it, and somewhere in that whole process, making it." A little later he lets up on himself, deciding that he's not a liar but a swindler, "because I trick the audience, lead them into a reality different from the one they are accustomed to."

That's an understatement. The reality he delivers in his 1987 feature Robinson's Garden isn't just different, it's downright outlandish. Yamamoto wants to "destroy the unity and connectivity" among the diversified images of his films, and he certainly succeeds in that. Robinson's Garden, released on DVD by Facets Video, is less a coherent story than a two-hour sequence of discombobulated shots and scenes, ranging from the strangely alluring to the simply weird. You may feel like you're visiting someone else's reverie, or that you're trapped in someone else's nightmare. Either way, watching it unfold is a distinctly dreamlike experience, and that's what surrealism is all about.

Robinson's Garden does have a plot, sort of. It centers on a young woman named Kumi who oscillates between earning a legitimate living and dealing drugs for extra cash. Her life changes when she becomes enchanted with a wild garden next to an abandoned factory she's stumbled on. She sets about transforming the building into a sort of hippie haven, making the garden into an area for work and play that she shares with a little girl who's wandered by. But what started as a utopian project turns into a painful and impossible one when Kumi becomes gravely ill. She lurches back to the big city on her bicycle, only to find the place as ugly and inhospitable as she remembered it. So it's back to the garden-if she can make it, and if she can survive there against the odds. The finale involves the little girl, a bird in a cage, a high-flying toy airplane, and a sense of ongoing mystery.

Yamamoto is a multicultural artist. Robinson's Garden reflects this in its title and its underlying story idea, which are borrowed from Daniel Defoe's great classic The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, &c. In addition, Yamamoto often works with non-Japanese crews. He shot his 2000 production Limousine Drive in New York with members of Spike Lee's technical team, and he filmed Robinson's Garden with some of Jim Jarmusch's collaborators, including cinematographer Tom DiCillo, a talented director in his own right. This is interesting, since while Jarmusch and Lee are different from each other in all kinds of ways, both of them have mastered a kind of tightly controlled pandemonium that's very different from the largely uncontrolled pandemonium that Yamamoto likes to unleash. You can spot some moments in Robinson's Garden when DiCillo's fluid visual style is evident-the agonizing late-night bike ride, for instance, and a long scene in a fast-food joint where chaos rules and offers of free asparagus (!) fail to alleviate Kumi's terrible ailment. But most of the picture is clearly dominated by Yamamoto's inimitable vision, and whether you wind up loving or hating his manipulations of reality, you'll be in his grip as long as you stay on his relentlessly quirky wavelength. If you can't or won't stay on that wavelength, you may want to hit the stop button long before the picture finishes.

The cast of Robinson's Garden is definitely on Yamamoto's wavelength, acting less like real, everyday people than like figures in a fever dream. It's hard to say which performers might be professionals and which might be amateurs, since Yamamoto auditions professional actors in the usual way, but is happy to go with nonactors if the auditions don't give him exactly what he has in mind for specific characters. He wants his films to center on real-seeming people "who could actually exist," and nowadays he limits himself to one or two takes of a scene in order to preserve a sense of freewheeling spontaneity. Robinson's Garden dates from an earlier period when he felt that pushing his performers and even being "a little sadistic" was necessary to getting the desired results; but the picture still has a semi-improvised aura. Which is appropriate, since most of the characters are as idiosyncratic as the movie itself, thanks to delirious acting by Kumiko Ohta as Kumi and a spirited supporting cast.

To sum up, Yamamoto's style is an acquired taste. If you want to acquire it, Robinson's Garden-the first of his four features to date-is a good place to start.

For more information about Robinson's Garden, visit Facets Multi-Media. To order Robinson's Garden, go to TCM Shopping.

by David Sterritt