Rendan: Quartet for Two

Character actor and occasional director Naoto Takenaka spins this farce on gender roles and contemporary mores. Thoughtful, diminutive Shotaro Sasaki (Takenaka) inherited a stack of money and a large Western-style house from his landlord father. As a result, he retired from his white-collar job to do what he really enjoys -- cooking, keeping house, and caring for his teenaged daughter Mari (Keika Fukitsuka) and ten-year-old son Toru (Yuta Minowa). A towering specimen of femininity, his wife Minako (Yuki Amami) bullies her way around the house the same way she bullied her way to the top of a construction firm. Though Minako rains snide comments on him, Shotaro brushes it off because he's happy in his domestic bliss. All this changes one day while eating ramen at a neighborhood stand, where Shotaro and Toru are confronted by the furious spouse of a subordinate of Minako's. She showers the two with glossy photographs of her husband and his wife having an unorthodox business meeting in a love hotel. The marriage promptly falls apart following an intense and strangely physical row about the matter.