'MY DREAMS ARE really boring; they're just extensions of daily life," director Kiyoshi Kurosawa says. "I make movies in order to have more interesting dreams."

The movies Kurosawa dreams can contain eerie premonitions: on Sept. 10, 2001, his superb Kaïro screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, reaching a bleak climax of sorts with an image of a doomed plane spewing black exhaust as it hurtled toward a cityscape. How did the director feel one day later? "What I think I learned after Sept. 11 was that if you are just true to yourself, it's possible to be entirely overwhelmed and impotent in the face of a much more overpowering force with a stratagem or design of its own. Somehow, maybe at least at the end of my films, I need to stake a claim to a direction, if not a solution."

He does just that in the memorable final shot of his follow-up to Kaïro, which opens at the Four Star Theatre this week. Arriving in the wake of previous efforts devoted to murderous hypnotists, doomed marriages, and dispiriting technology, Bright Future's English-language title seems like the height of irony, but in fact, the man behind the camera plays it straight, or at least as straight as any masculine melodrama – one involving an army of jellyfish, no less – can be. While young dreamer Nimura (Jo Odagiri) and fellow towelette factory coworker Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano) grapple with fraternal and paternal ties that bind, the director rejects his usual shadows and shades of gray to uncork a dandy's colorful palette and a '60s-era Godard approach to pop signposts that ranges from Guided by Voices to Kramer vs. Kramer before finally embracing an icon of radical chic.

"All of a sudden, both in Japan and abroad, people began to pigeonhole me as a horror film expert of some sort," the director says, when asked about Bright Future's genre-bending tendencies. "I wanted to show to the world that I have more within me. I wanted to make films that either combined several different types of genre or that break down the boundaries of genre to form something wholly new."

Bright Future's premiere at Cannes placed Kurosawa on the same program as one of his idols, Clint Eastwood. ("I didn't really meet him," he says, "but I saw him at a 10-meter distance.") The film's delayed local arrival corresponds to the DVD release of his most recent film, Doppelganger (TLA Entertainment, $24.99), which played last year's San Francisco International Film Festival. Fittingly, Doppelganger reunites the director with his own double of sorts, Shall We Dance star Koji Yakusho, who also appears in Kurosawa's earlier features Seance and Cure. The scenario – involving an "artificial human body chair" that looks like an escapee from Short Circuit – allows the director to poke fun at his dour image.

"When Yakusho is playing the protagonist," Kurosawa explains, "because our age is much closer, the character he portrays often reflects my own sensitivities, and my questioning process becomes manifest." He's quick to outline the differences between Yakusho and Bright Future star Asano, whose work with Beat Takeshi, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, and perhaps most infamously, Miike Takashi, has led magazines such as Traces to herald him as a new breed of leading man. "[Yakusho's] self remains very elusive," Kurosawa says. "He can don any kind of mask to become any kind of character. Asano has an absolute raw confidence in his self, and so he tends to take on the characters as extensions of his self. They come at acting from completely divergent angles, but the results, with both of them, are fantastic."

As for Kurosawa, his next project just might be fantastically grim – good news for devotees who consider Kaïro a 21st-century high mark. "I'm intending for it to be a love story with a horror touch that ultimately will turn into a tragedy," he says, before adding, "I hesitate to say this because it may be misunderstood, but if I were to raise one example of the type of film I'm going for, it would be Hitchcock's Vertigo."

Johnny Ray Huston

'Bright Future' screens March 18-25, Four Star Theatre, 200 Clement, S.F. $6.50-$8.50. (415) 666-3488.

Thanks to Taro Goto and Linda Hoaglund for translation assistance.