Operatic tenor and conceptual musician Yuri Obitani made one of the most spectacular debuts ever in Japanese independent film with The Hair Opera. It opens with Obitani himself casting about for ways to entertain the viewer when he comes across an exhibition by woman artist Yosefu Kosuzu. Her show consists of neatly mounted specimens of male pubic hair, each one named and dated to mark the occasion when she had sex with the man concerned. Excited, Obitani interviews her -- and proposes an exchange of film ′letters′ on Super-8. But it turns out that Obitani is less interested in questions of art than in winning a place in her next exhibition of pubic hair.. The Hair Opera was the most startling and compulsive work of first-person, materialist film-making since David Holzman shot his famous Diary in 1967. The film consists of the ′letters′ exchanged between Obitani and the woman artist -- until the flow of letters peters out, and Obitani takes desperate measures to keep it going. Finally, we see not only how the ontology of the film image can shift and slide but also how film itself can be used as a weapon in a sexual assault. (Tony Rayns)