This hypnotic and extraordinarily beautiful film weds French surrealism to Japanese ghost story (with a bit of German expressionism thrown in to make it a ménage à trois). Set in the late 1920s-a pre-war period of changing mores in Japan akin to that in Weimar Germany-the story actually involves a ménage à cinq. A Japanese professor of German on vacation in a seaside resort is drawn, through an old university acquaintance, into a bizarre sexual pentangle involving a geisha and a woman who resembles her exactly (both are played by Naoko Otani), as well as his own wife. Denizens of the supernatural appear to roam comfortably in the free-spirited universe in which the professor finds himself. The title refers to Sarasate's violin composition, a piece that haunts this film both as an element of its story and in the score. Suzuki's first truly independent film, Zigeunerweisen won the Japanese Oscar and the prize at Berlin; Japanese critics recently voted it the greatest Japanese film of the eighties.