“One day the lizard woke up and realized, that it was all alone on this earth.”

So begins the children’s book “The Last Lizard” and so begins Ratanaruang’s film “The Last Life in the Universe”, with Kenji, who, as the lizard, realizes, that he is all alone. By accident he encounters his spiritual twin, and exact opposition, in Noi. He is obsessive about order, she is spontaneous and throws things around. He is obsessive about being clean, she never cleans. He is introverted, she is extroverted. Yet, as they say, opposites attract, and that certainly is the case here. More than that, their symmetry expands further, as he is from Osaka and she is going there.

More than just a love story, “Last Life in the Universe” is an odyssey into the souls of two people, throughout accompanied by the last lizard. The story itself is thin, at times bordering on cliché, but as it dwells with these quirky characters, we chose to ignore it to drift away with them. Within the universe of “Last Life in the Universe”, time has no meaning.

The major contributor to this is Christopher Doyle, who here demonstrates, in my opinion, his best technical work as DoP to date. Not only is his cinematography breathtaking, but it has a life of its own, where a single frame, one moment can serve as a scene, the next as a flashback, the next as a flash forward, and thus becomes a palette which defies time and structure.

Finally, lets not forget Tadanobu Asano, who seems not only to be the hottest Japanese actor right now, but also the best Japanese actor in many years, even though most use his soft introverted side. Asano gives an impressive performance here, and while I personally favor his acting in “Zatoichi”, both films affected each other in Venice, where Asano was given the best actor award for “Last Life in the Universe”. He is the lizard.

Often compared with both “In the Mood for Love” and “Lost in Translation”, “Last Life in the Universe” only shares relations by single plot elements. It is very capable of standing on its own and easily is one of the best films of 2004.

Henrik Sylow