Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) - plain Yoshii to his friends, and there aren't many of them - is a young, intelligent man, who supplements his tedious factory day job by making money - quite a lot of money - in the shady, borderline legal world of re-selling, under the name 'Ratel' (literally an aggressive badger). As we meet him he's scalping some unfortunate supplier of medical equipment, unable to shift his stock; so Yoshii takes it off his hands for a ludicrously low price and sells the whole stock on line at a staggering markup (quite why the medical supplier couldn't have done the same thing beats me).
At work Yoshii's boss recognises his talents and urges him to pursue a management career at the factory, but the part time seller, whose clandestine sideline makes him increasingly paranoid, chooses instead to pack in the day job and relocate to the country with his acquisitive girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), while at the same time ghosting a re-selling friend Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) who's offered him the chance to get rich quick via a new online sales platform.
At their country house an increasingly bored Akiko hopes that their relocation might offer more glamour, instead of the usual sales cycle involving living among piles of boxed goods. Yoshii takes on an assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), keen to learn and obedient. But Yoshii's paranoia remains intact; a broken window at night suggests a prowler, and an ill advised visit to the police to report the crime results only in drawing the authorities' attention to him, a mistake when he starts trading in counterfeit goods. But it's the further knockdown purchase of a set of collectable dolls, again sold online at considerable markup, that tips things over the edge. Those negatively impacted by Yoshii's activities want revenge, and there's safety in numbers.
Until the last few minutes of Cloud, this felt like a slightly fantastically told moral tale. Kurosawa shows us a world where everyone's on the make, inhabiting a grey market arena which is hard, ruthless but perhaps preferable to a day job and a need to be accountable; although there's nothing glamorous about Yoshii's life. Part of the distaste of what Yoshii is doing, irrespective of how glamorous and exciting he sees it, is the constant exploitation of people in a similar economic situation to him.
That the mentioned revenge takes the form of an (over) extended shootout which occupies roughly half the film is baffling, like two movies sandwiched into one. There's no one to root for here; those with whom one might have sympathy - the men exploited by Yoshii - prove equally capable of random violence. And yet the ending suggests that nothing, even right and wrong, is straightforward in our consumer world. It's an odd film where both exploiter and exploited flail around in a world overstuffed with things, knowing, to coin an old phrase, the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Cloud plays in cinemas from 25 April.
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