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Yanagimachi addresses the way people live through movies—the way they see life as an imitation of art, and not the other way around. As Matsukawa (Shuji Kashiwabara) anxiously prepares his movie, his girlfriend Yukari (Hinano Yoshikawa) monitors his every move, pestering him about their looming marriage, threatening to kill him if he catches him with another woman, and asking to put his sperm in storage (he agrees to the latter, but only on the condition that she gives him money for software he needs to edit his film). She may be nuts, but she isn't seen as a real person by Matsukawa's crewmates so much as a facsimile of Isabelle Adjani's crazed character from Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. Likewise, the frustrated professor Nakajo (Hirotaro Honda), a former filmmaker who's fascination with a pretty young woman not only stirs memory's floodgates but seems to trigger a midlife crisis, is seen as a mirror reflection of Dirk Bogarde's character from Visconti's Death in Venice.