Suwarôteiru - (Swallowtail Butterfly) / 1996

 

Suwarôteiru - (Swallowtail Butterfly) is the film where Shunji Iwai stops being gentle and just lets things get messy.

If you come to it expecting his usual soft, melancholic teenage longing, quiet sadness (Hideaki Anno is that you?) — this will feel out of place.

The film drops you straight into Yentown, a near-future slum packed with immigrants, scams, bad money, and people trying to survive without much of a plan. It’s dystopian, but not in a sci-fi way. More like a city that’s already broken and just keeps going.

The heart of it is simple and kind of brutal. Ageha loses her mother and ends up with Glico, a sex worker who agrees to take her in because she needs the cash. There’s no big maternal awakening, no clean arc. They stick together because they have to. For a while, it works. They build something that almost feels stable — which, of course, is when it all starts to fall apart.

The film refuses to sit still. It jumps between street drama, crime story, pop-idol fantasy, and back again. Characters show up, matter a lot for a moment, then disappear. It can feel unfocused, even frustrating, but that chaos feels intentional. It isn’t telling a neat story — it is letting you drift through a place, a world where nothing stays fixed for too long.

Visually it’s rough, noisy, sometimes weird - there is quite a lot of Handheld camera, crowded frames, and no gloss. The soundtrack is deeply embedded in the film, especially Chara, who feels less like an actress and more like a presence the movie is built around.

What stuck with me isn’t the plot mechanics, but the feeling: the belief that money, success, or the next big break will make everything settle down — and the quiet realization that it won’t. Swallowtail Butterfly lets you enjoy that fantasy just long enough before it pulls it apart. It’s flawed, chaotic, and very alive. And somehow, years later, it still lingers - maybe it is the evident reasoning about capitalism and it's consequences, maybe is that exotic fascination we get from a certain aesthetic, still, it's a movie worth your time and that deserves more international recognition -