If you're an online scam artist, it's best that you cover your tracks. That's a small part of what we learn from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, an elusive, tone-shifting movie that begins with the same sense of detachment found in its main character. Yoshii (Masaki Suda) works in a factory but supplements his income by buying cheap goods and reselling them online at inflated prices, sometimes present them as designer merchandise. Cloud can be read as a cautionary tale about the internet or as a critique of unscrupulous capitalism. But part of the movie's allure is the mystery Kurosawa creates about his intentions. He plunges us into a world in which Yoshi reveals little of his interior life, even as he relates to his sometime live-in girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa). After quitting his job and suspecting trouble, Yoshii moves with Furukawa's Akiko to a rural town outside Tokyo. There, he hires Sando (Daiken Okudaira), an assistant who'll play an increasingly important role in the plot. Yoshii's victims eventually try to hunt him down. No point telling more except to say that Kurosawa builds toward a bullet-riddled finale that takes place in an abandoned industrial site that evokes memories of other revenge sagas. Kurosawa's refusal to dot every "i'' or cross every "t" may provide patient viewers with more than they bargained for in a movie that wisely leaves us wondering where to place our sympathies -- or whether we should place them at all.
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