A spell of time in the life of the five-piece Haruno family in rural Tochigi Prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.

The pristine image of the Japanese family is turned on its uber-polite head with surreal aplomb in this far out collection of hilarious vignettes. Set in the languid countryside, mom is an eccentric artist who eschews household chores for an animation project with occasional help from crazy grandpa. Meanwhile dad is just your everyday hypnotherapist. Their teenaged son suffers from hangups about the opposite sex while his little sister must contend with a doppelgänger. Uncle is a groovy music producer on a respite whose ghostly past experiences still haunt him.

Maverick director Katsuhito Ishii (who created the animated sequence in Kill Bill: Vol. 1) pulled out all the stops for this endearing outré take on the Japanese psyche. Replete with non-stop irreverent gags, anime digressions, musical numbers and candy-coated lysergic passages, THE TASTE OF TEA is, “a true delight that elevates feel-good cinema to a whole new level and charms from start to finish” (Screen Anarchy). -FILM MOVEMENT

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