Sette notti in Giappone

The beloved and greatly admired British director, Lewis 'Alfie' Gilbert's manifestly curious, somewhat obscure, demonstratively middle of the road, doomed 'odd-couple' romance, 'Seven Nights in Japan' (1976) even with all its torpid trivialities, remains quite a distracting, perhaps even genuinely touching, albeit terrifically twee love story about a bored, dashingly debonair Prince (Michael York) and his erstwhile beau, a disarmingly pretty tour guide (Hidemi Ioki) he meets while gleefully shirking his seemingly unexciting Royal duties; and, quite frankly, as cute, 'meet-cutes' go, it's pretty goddamn cute! While blatantly old fashioned in style and tone, almost absurdly sentimental, Lewis Gilbert's seemingly forgotten, 'Seven Nights in Japan' nonetheless has some considerable cinematic merit as a richly fascinating view/travelogue of 1970s Japan, with legendary French DP, Henri Decaë's tastefully roving camera giving us poor proles a rather Princely view of all the myriad exquisite, breathtakingly beautiful vistas that our handsome pair of magisterially mismatched movie lovers enjoy during their playful, picture book, romantic journey towards the inevitably soft-focus consummation! This unsophisticated, sweetly glutinous tale is pure narrative candyfloss, but not cloyingly so, and I was more than happy to wallow unthinkingly in its stupefying, reality-numbing, excessively sugary sentimentality until its somewhat underwhelming conclusion! I should also like to note that the film's acclaimed cinematographer, Henri Decaë, also shot Truffaut's landmark, '400 Blows' and Jean-Pierre Melville's hard-boiled Gallic-crime classic, 'Le Samouraï'!