Sent to Yunnan Province in Mainland China on business, meek Japanese salaryman Wada (GEMINI’s Masahiro Motoki) finds himself shadowed by a hot-headed yakuza named Uijie (Miike regular Renji Ishibashi). The gangster claims that Wada’s company owes Uijie’s boss money and insists on accompanying the young man into the mountains, where he has been instructed to confirm the existence of a large source of unrefined jade. Joining them is local guide Shen (Makoto Iwamatsu, very well known to Western audiences as simply Mako), who navigates the pair through an array of increasingly backwater locales, via some decidedly erratic modes of transportation. Once at their destination, the visitors become infatuated with this idyllic, untouched paradise and its natives, whose ancestors could reputedly fly.

Artsmagic’s latest Takashi Miike release is among the director’s most unique and admirable undertakings, in which he took his crew out into the magnificent wilds of rural China to adapt a novel by Makoto Shiina (who never actually journeyed to this area). The film starts off with a flurry of activity and then, appropriately, the pace becomes more and more measured as the protagonists venture further away from civilization and the stress of modern big city life. A common facet of Miike’s films is the transplanting of his Japanese protagonists in other Asian countries and how their perceptions of the world and themselves change as a result. BIRD PEOPLE may be the director’s ultimate experiment in this area, as his salaryman and yakuza are completely adrift in a world so alien to them, it might as well be the setting for a period fantasy (a feeling enhanced by occasional doses of magic realism). Wada falls for a local girl (Wang Li-li), with a surprising ancestry, but Uijie experiences a near-complete transformation upon re-discovering his inner child. When he feels this intoxicating serenity is being threatened, his violent nature inexorably resurfaces, but Miike ends this exotic odyssey on a poignant note that reminds one of the wonders lost to mankind via the relentless encroachment of civilization. It is a charming, often humorous and sincerely acted picture, and another entry in the Miike filmography which shows that his versatility rivals his more widely documented productivity.