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A true cinema of surrealism is often alluded to but is now rarely practised-Twilights genuinely returns to the film strategies of early Hans Richter and Luis Bunuel and reiterates Andre Breton's surrealist manifesto. The universal-the secret psychological desires concealed within culture's nostalgia for the lost - hovers over the film. But Twilights is also about a particular history and mass emotional loss, the utter dislocation between the pre and postwar Japanese social epochs and their social codes.
There are the disassociations of surreal art-odd ellipsis, jump cuts metamorphoses, narratives only explicable at symbolic levels. Also familiar is a peculiar talismanic affectation for pleasant recollections of Japanese social life and the popular cinema history which is its companion.
However this recreation of the flat Tokyo suburban industrial wasteland and its characters from the pre-war silent salaryman genre (best known to us from Ozu' s I was born but... ) is a sinister fly trap capturing from cinephelic pleasures the dark symbols of an approaching disaster.