Does Your Soul Have a Cold?

Mike Mills' striking documentary is a fascinating portrait of modern Tokyo and its inhabitants, sharing similar concerns with his debut fiction feature, the wonderful Thumbsucker, in that it is about the harmful effects of mood-altering drugs on susceptible and conflicted people.

The concept of depression and the use of anti-depressants have not been readily understood or accepted in Japan. Yet things changed in the early part of this century, when Western pharmaceutical companies began marketing campaigns for anti-depressant medication. Since then, Japanese awareness of depression and sales of antidepressants have been rapidly on the rise.

Mills' film follows five sufferers who have bought into the notion that pills will cure their ills, one even commenting, not completely without irony, that one reason for trying the treatment in the first place was being sold on the idea that "anything from America is good".

The film is wholly sympathetic to these diverse characters, including a very droll woman working at a T-shirt printers and a bisexual man who finds release appearing as a slave in live bondage shows, and viewers learn as much about them from the possessions and clutter in their lives (the books, the toys, the boxes full of tablets) that Mills' camera is drawn to, as from what they do and say.

Michael Hayden