Kotoko starts with an intensity that doesn’t diminish throughout the film. The story could pan out as a recognisable tale of a woman whose anxieties are exacerbated by her role as a new mother. Kotoko is paranoid, exhausted, and losing her grip on reality. So far, so what? But Shin’ya Tsukamoto has a unique vision, as we know from his Tetsuo films. In actual fact, this familiar account, shot in vérité style, includes an extreme level of violence. This brutality takes place in the narrative world of the film: Kotoko experiences beatings but also administers them generously herself. It is also part of Tsukamoto’s treatment of her psychological state and her mental decline. One technique is to manipulate diegetic sounds to create a sense of overwhelming agitation. He makes cooking with a large wok sound like being run over by a truck. This is interwoven with sweet and contemplative shots, many lingering on Kotoko, played by Tsukamoto’s attractive writing collaborator and star of the film, Cocco. Images of beautiful women harming themselves don’t do it for me but, on the whole, this filmmaker’s capacity to portray transgressive violence on screen, which you can feel in your own body as you watch, is pretty phenomenal.
The East End Film Festival opens on 3 July and runs until 8 July 2012. Kotoko screens on 5 July at the Rich Mix. For more information please visit the East End Film Festival website.
During the J-Horror boom of the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, no aspect of contemporary Japanese life seemed to be off limits to filmmakers aiming to make audiences jump out of their seats: from the videotape in Ring (1998), to wife-seeking in Audition (1999), to electricity in Pulse (2001), to an apartment leak in Dark Water (2002), to cell phones in One Missed Call (2004), directors such as Hideo Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike appropriated aspects of consumer culture or domestic life to suit their respective scare tactics. Arriving as the cycle was arguably running out of commercial and creative steam, Sion Sono’s Exte is a bizarre genre entry that adds hair extensions to the ever-expanding list of modern phenomena that you should beware of because it might be haunted. Distributed by major studio Toei and featuring a recognisable star in Chiaki Kuriyama, best known for playing violent schoolgirls in Battle Royale (2000) and Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), this was Sono’s chance to cross over into a lucrative market following a series of controversial independent films - Suicide Club (2001), Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), Strange Circus (2005) - that firmly established his credentials as a cult auteur. Yet it finds the director working around, rather than adhering to, the rules of genre, suggesting a brief fling with the system rather than a bid for regular employment. Despite this dual identity, Exte succeeds in imbuing its urban nightmare scenario with the director’s trademark societal exposé to be sufficiently interesting for genre aficionados and Sono devotees alike.
Exte opens with customs agents discovering large quantities of human hair in a shipping container, along with the body of a young girl. At the morgue, an autopsy confirms that the girl has been the victim of organ theft, probably committed by a human harvesting operation. Before the investigation can continue, night watchman Yamazaki (Ren Osugi) steals the body and takes it home, where he discovers that it is re-growing hair, not only from the head but also from other parts and orifices. This sexually excites Yamazaki, who is a hair fetishist, while also providing an additional stream of income as he is able to make extensions and sell them to salons. One business that he visits is the place of work of Yûko (Chiaki Kuriyama), a stylist who is taking care of Mami (Miku Satô), the eight-year-old daughter of her irresponsible sister, Kiyomi (Tsugumi). The staff of the salon are impressed by the quality of Yamazaki’s extensions, but the employee who tries them on is killed later that night: the dead girl has a score to settle with society, and her hair is able to control the minds of those who wear it, sharing her horrible experience on the operating table, before committing murder from beyond the grave. Yamazaki’s infatuation with the hair of Yuko and Mami places them in danger, while Sono has macabre fun with his main prop: hair sprouts from eyes and mouths, holds police detectives captive, and slices with the severity of a very sharp knife.
As with his subsequent ‘true crime’ stories Cold Fish (2010) and Guilty of Romance (2011), which favoured narratives of transgression over accurate dramatisation of the facts, Exte finds Sono demonstrating a general disregard for the genre in which he is operating: this is ostensibly a horror film, yet the director spends as much time exploring the fractured family unit as he does staging the requisite shocking set pieces. Mami is a neglected child, and possibly a victim of abuse: the sadistic Kiyomi uses Mami as a means of accessing her sister’s apartment to steal food and raid the wardrobe for new clothing, while treating her daughter as a punching bag when her mood swings. Sono also throws in enough darkly humorous details and lines of dialogue to suggest that he does not take the genre as seriously as his contemporaries: the name of the salon is Gilles de Rais, a reference to the 15th-century French mass murderer, and lines like ‘My nose hair’s out of control lately’ openly acknowledge the ridiculous nature of the premise. Even some of the expository exchanges are played for knowing laughs, such as Yuko’s conversations with her roommate. However, there are some very strange special effects to satisfy gore-hounds, with hair shooting out from a woman’s head, attaching to the ceiling, then lifting her up before dropping its victim to her death. Exte would be immediately overshadowed by the epic satire of Love Exposure (2008), but it remains a typically subversive, and occasionally brilliant, Sono experience.
Part of the Kaneto Shindô and Kozaburo Yoshimura restrospective
Director: Kaneto Shindô
Writer: Kaneto Shindô
Original title:Hadaka no shima
Alternative title:The Island
Cast: Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama, Shinji Tanaka
Japan 1960
96 mins
Kaneto Shindô’s The Naked Island is arguably one of the masterpieces of the Japanese New Wave, yet the saga of its production is just as compelling as the events depicted on screen. Set on a small island in the Setonaikai archipelago, the body of water that separates the three main islands of Japan, this is a story of hardship that frames the struggles of a peasant family against an awe-inspiring yet unforgiving landscape. It was also a location that would test Shindô’s resilience throughout the two-month shoot, with the treacherous natural environment serving as an appropriate metaphor for the economic conditions under which the director was working. The Naked Island was financed through the independent company Kindaï Eiga Kyokai, which was founded by Shindô, fellow director Kôzaburô Yoshimura, and actor Taiji Tonoyama when the two filmmakers left Shôchiku Studios to develop personal projects without restriction. Yet audiences did not share their concerns. Politicised films such as Lucky Dragon Number 5 (1959), which criticised atomic bomb testing, failed commercially, and as his company was on the verge of bankruptcy Shindô embarked on The Naked Island with a budget that was one-tenth the national average. If a family member had been shooting behind-the-scenes footage, or if the film had been made during EPK (electronic press kit) era, then a documentary about the production of The Naked Island would rival Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) and Lost in La Mancha (2002) as an examination of an ambitious project on the brink of collapse.
The Naked Island will be released in the UK on Blu-ray by Eureka Entertainment on 17 June 2013.
However, such a record is perhaps unnecessary, as anyone with some knowledge of the production process of The Naked Island, or the geographic region in which it was shot, will be able to appreciate the difficulties that Shindô and his crew dealt with on a daily basis. Although the film is infused with a poetic quality that is enhanced through the almost total absence of dialogue, this is very much a realistic vision of island life: surroundings are not presented as a utopian paradise, but as tough terrain with limited hydrologic resources. The problems caused by the lack of water largely constitute the minimalist narrative as the family, who are the island’s only occupants, obtain water for their plants and themselves by rowing their boat to a neighbouring island. This task is undertaken alongside other physically draining chores, carried out while unprotected from the heat of the sun, resulting in a cyclical experience for both the protagonists and the audience. Drudgery eventually leads to disaster: while the parents are away from the island, their older son falls ill, and his father must race to find a doctor before his offspring’s symptoms prove to be fatal. Such drama would usually inject urgency into a study of the family unit, but Shindô maintains the detached approach of a documentarian. He positions the family as hard-working farmers trying to live off the land, but is unsentimental with regards to their predicament. Nature is in control of both their future and the rhythm of Shindô’s filmmaking.
The Naked Island evokes the necessary routine of life away from civilisation through the constant sound of waves and Hikaru Hayashi’s haunting score, which mostly repeats the same melody throughout the film. Kiyoshi Kuroda’s striking cinematography captures each area of the island with such clarity that the family’s constant struggle becomes deeply moving, despite Shindô’s restraint. Nagisa Ôshima famously criticised the film, suggesting that Shindô had conceded to the image that other countries had of Japan in order to achieve overseas success. Beyond its setting, however, The Naked Island is characteristic of Japanese cinema in that it emphasises steadfast determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity: the only ‘reward’ that the family receives for suffering the trials of the island is being able to carry on living until their shared willpower runs out. Shindô was more fortunate as The Naked Island was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1961 Moscow International Film Festival in a tie with Grigori Chukhrai’s Chistoye nebo (1961), with sales to international distributors rescuing his company in its hour of need. In addition, the firm relationships that were formed with Hayashi and Kuroda under considerable pressure led Shindô to adopt a collective mode of production that would result in such subsequent classics as Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). When he went out on location, the financially desperate Shindô thought that The Naked Island would be his last film, but it instead resulted in the kind of resurgence that can only come from the most trying of circumstances.
Directed by Sion Sono, who brought us Suicide Club (2001), and more recently Cold Fish (2010), Himizu is an urgent and topical film. Located in the midst of the devastation in the aftermath of the tsunami of 2011, the film shows a society that is not only physically destroyed but also socially falling to pieces. Fifteen-year-old Yuichi Sumida (Shôta Sometani) lives with his neglectful mother in a boat hire shop. His drunken father only lurches into view when he needs cash and curses Sumida, wishing him dead and reminding him about the time he saved Sumida from drowning, an act he bitterly regrets on account of the insurance he could have claimed. Sumida is also the object of a school girl crush on the part of the hyper Keiko (Fumi Nikaidô) - ‘Am I a stalker? Yes, I am’ - to whom he is (at best) indifferent. The boat house is also a gathering place for a disparate bunch of refugees who serve as a Greek chorus and attempt to help Sumida in his troubles even as he hopelessly pursues his wish to lead an ordinary, normal and boring life.
Tragedy overtakes him, however, and with his chances of normality gone forever, he teeters on the edge of madness, haunted by recurring dreams of apocalypse. Threatened also by the yakuza, who are pursuing his father’s gambling debts, Sumida considers suicide but wants to do something genuinely good that will redeem him before he dies.
Sono’s film is a deeply unsettling view of modern day Japan. It is a society in which the adults have an antagonistic, if not downright hostile, relationship to their offspring. Sumida’s parents are blandly negligent on one side and furiously hateful on the other, but this isn’t simply an isolated case. Keiko interrupts her mother and father, who are in the process of building her a gallows. ‘You’ll use it when we’ve finished,’ they tell her. School is an irrelevance that spouts new age platitudes about hope and individuality while having no real impact on the lives of the pupils. The only sympathetic adults in the piece are the refugees, but they themselves have had their lives reduced to vagabondage that in its precarious vulnerability is not that far from childhood.
Although originally based on a manga by Minoru Furuya, the script was changed at the last minute by Sono to incorporate the tsunami and the subsequent nuclear drama that was played out. Sono took his crew to one of the most devastated areas for some of the scenes. The film was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2011, a mere six months after the tsunami had hit Japan. It treats the aftermath in a tangential manner, alluding rather than depicting. But the whole film is imbued with an out-of-joint surreality, a topsy-turvy universe in which the generations are pitched against each other. There is no sign of authority and every now and then an ominous growling roar is heard as if there is another earthquake on its way, waiting to happen on the margins of the frame. This is a much more serious film than the dark comedy of Cold Fish. Despite the freakishness of the plot, there is a mournful tone that the use of Mozart and Samuel Barber reinforces. This is a satirical and in some ways despairingly angry film. In its privileging of the point of view of the young, Himizu is reminiscent of The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979). Hope, if it is to come at all, will be brought out by the young kids who play out their relationship in the worst possible conditions and yet have an independence and resilience that will allow them in some way to survive.
Takashi Miike’s 2007 high school actioner is released on DVD on 9 April 2012 by MVM. Another typically ultra-stylised and violent offering from the director of Ichi the Killer and 13 Assassins, Crows Zero charts the battle between two delinquent boys and their factions fighting for supremacy in the lawless Suzuran high school. Based on the bestselling manga by Hiroshi Takahashi (screenwriter of the original Ring movies), Crows Zero is one of Miike’s most commercially successful movies.
Lady Snowblood started her life as the heroine of a manga written by Kazuo Koike in the early 70s, before being incarnated by the actress Meiko Kaji in two film adaptations of the story, Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld (1973) and Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974), both directed by Toshiya Fujita. Strong from her turns as the leader of a delinquent girl gang in the Stray Cat Rock series (1970-71), and as a cold-blooded avenger in the Female Convict Scorpion films (1972-73), the enigmatic, steely-eyed Kaji was the perfect choice to play a 19th-century assassin out to avenge the rape of her mother and the murder of her family.
Blizzard from the Netherworld opens in Tokyo Prison in Meiji 7 (1874). A woman gives birth as snow falls outside, announcing to her newborn daughter, barely out of the womb: ‘Yuki, you were born for vengeance, a child of the netherworld.’ The film cuts to the now adult Yuki dispatching a local criminal in an eerily quiet, snowy street. As she squares up to the gangster’s henchmen, snow falls from a nearby roof, landing inches from their feet, an act of aggression that suggests that Yuki is almost supernaturally in control. As we are repeatedly told throughout the film, Yuki is not quite human; her name means ‘snow’ in Japanese, and she is an elemental force, unstoppable and indestructible. Conjured up from hell to carry out her mother’s revenge, she is the embodiment of an idée fixe.
Her full name, ‘Shurayuki-hime’, is a pun on the Japanese for Snow White, ‘Shirayuki-hime’. The Kanji character ‘Shura’ means ‘the netherworld’, a place of carnage, and ‘hime’ is ‘princess’. In the Grimm fairy tale, Snow White is also conjured up by her mother out of blood and snow: the queen, having pricked her finger and seen the drop of blood on the snow, wishes for a daughter that would have ‘skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony’. Just like Lady Snowblood, Snow White is plucked from her mother’s fancy, and fashioned out of the elements that the queen can see around her. This quasi-magical birth conveys all the mystery of procreation, and the combination of blood and snow clearly has sexual undertones, with the hot red flow fertilising white water; a mixing of fluids, but also of states, liquid and solid, life and death, to create a new being. No wonder that the combination of blood and snow, so over-used, still remains powerful: it is the image of primordial creation.
Or destruction, in the case of Yuki. As she walks away from the first scene of carnage, the narrator explains: ‘People say that what cleanses this world of decay is not pure white snow but snow that is stained fiery red: the snow of the netherworld.’ It is a striking inversion of the symbolism of snow, and the image is brilliantly paradoxical. True to her name, Yuki is a contradictory being: a demonic creature hell-bent on destruction, but pure in her single-minded purpose of revenge.
Visually, the film makes much of the white/red contrast, starting with the female convicts in their red prison uniforms surrounding the newborn Yuki, wrapped in a white cloth. Yuki wears a white kimono for most of the film, the perfect backdrop for the Grand Guignol sprays of blood that regularly gush out of her victims. White clothes are in fact the starting point of the whole story: the husband of Yuki’s mother was killed because he was wearing white, and for that reason was mistakenly taken for a hated government official.
Naturally, the film ends with more blood and snow. Having accomplished the final act of her revenge, Yuki staggers out in the snow, wounded, her white kimono stained with blood. Clearly the welding of these elements - snow, blood, women and revenge - exerts a strange attraction, with that final scene in particular sowing seeds in the imagination of other filmmakers. Norifumi Suzuki’s Sex and Fury, released in 1973, was seemingly influenced by Blizzard from the Netherworld, although it upped the quotient of nudity, violence and sheer lunacy. Suzuki’s film similarly ends with the heroine stumbling out in the snow, her bare tattooed chest covered in blood, which she cleans with a handful of snow before walking away in the darkness as the snowflakes turn into hanafuda gambling cards. No such inventive re-interpretation in Tarantino’s Kill Bill 1 (2003), which simply regurgitated its cinematic precedents like a lesson well learnt. Park Chan-wook, on the other hand, ended his Lady Vengeance (2005) with the heroine being given tofu by her daughter; as they embrace in the snow, the white substances inside and around her offer the promise of cleansing and renewal. The snow holds no such promise at the end of Blizzard from the Netherworld, unique in its complex reading of snow; herself the purifier, Yuki is beyond cleansing and can only carry on down her path of revenge, even as all her enemies lie dead.
Mockumentaries have hit a rich vein of late, with the is-she-or-isn’t-she flirtation with truth and lies, the fact, fiction or faction of I Am Still Here, Cat Fish and Exit through the Gift Shop; the pranking of Borat and Bruno and the revival of the found footage horror genre of the Paranormal Activity franchise. Much of this can be traced to the nefarious activities of Endemol, and their swinish exploitation of reality to serve up Reality(TM), the human sacrifice (vote who to eliminate!), the pseudo-religious, cod-psychology rituals of the confessional and the gutting of any sense of distinction between the private and the public. Add to this our own starring in social networking sites and the fact that the political event of the decade resembled a set piece from a tent pole Hollywood movie but filmed in a way that anticipated Cloverfield. Jean Baudrillard couldn’t have written a better script for the noughties, the decade that made navel-gazing an internationally popular sport and gave us Saddam Hussein’s execution filmed on a camera phone and uploaded to YouTube.
It perhaps will come as a surprise then that over 40 years ago, Shôhei Imamura created the quintessential mockumentary, A Man Vanishes, a film essay revealing with cunning wit precisely these concerns and anticipating the traps of reality for filmmakers. In 1965, a plastic salesman, Tadashi Oshima, goes missing. There are many possible motives - guilt over an embezzlement at work, which was discovered and probably stymied his chances of promotion, the impending marriage to an overbearing fiancée. We are told that 90,000 Japanese men disappear every year, responding to social claustrophobia, work pressure and the watchful family. It is two years after the fact and a documentary crew, with the aid of Oshima’s fiancée - known as ‘the Rat’ - are on his trail. They try to reconstruct the events leading up to his disappearance, interviewing his family, his various girlfriends, his boss and workmates, and even a medium. We find out details of his life: he was a heavy drinker, successful with the ladies, used a lot of pomade on his hair. The crew often resort to hidden cameras and provocation of dubious ethical grounding. The pace of the film is insistent and driven, conversations and interviews overlap and fall out of synch with the images, still pictures are used and little black oblongs ostensibly preserve anonymity, but actually feel more like a stain of admitted guilt.
And yet for all the busyness and activity, Oshima is elusive. In fact, it is the very investigation itself - as indicated by the present tense of the title A Man Vanishes, not, as might be expected after two years have passed, ‘A Man Vanished’ - that erases his existence. He ceases to be a human being and becomes a missing person poster, an enigma, paradoxically flattened by the process of documentation. He now exists in Reality, and no longer reality.
The film begins to lose interest in him anyway and seems more concerned with revealing and examining its own methodology. The documentary makers meet like a secret cabal, a paranoiac’s worst nightmare. Their apparent objectivity is compromised by their obvious wish to manipulate and produce a good story. ‘It has to be more like an investigative film,’ the director (Imamura himself) mutters at one point. They use subtitles, not only to tell you who people are in relation to Oshima, but to pass on their own judgements. Why is Oshima’s fiancée known as the Rat? They become increasingly intrusive in the film as the investigation (like an investigation, but not actually an investigation) gets stuck on a hypothesis suggested in the interview with the medium. Was the Rat’s sister having an affair with Oshima? A tense dinner is arranged, which seems like one of those Big Brother moments when the contestants decide to have it out, and during which the sister (aka the Witch) is confronted with both the accusations and a witness (constantly referred to as the Fishmonger) who saw them together.
At this point, Imamura decisively intervenes, literally tearing the walls down and admitting the film to be a fiction, but the slipperiness of the construct and even the admission of fictionality doesn’t stop the film from its relentless pursuit of some larger meaning. This ‘meaning’ has completely erased the man of the title. In fact, if the man just turned up, the film would still go on searching for the ‘meaning’ that is only significant via its absence. It is no coincidence that the street argument that concludes the film (and which anticipates Jerry Springer’s spawn), as well as the argument at the dinner, hinges entirely on the veracity (or otherwise) of two mutually contradictory witnesses. Someone has to be lying for someone to be telling the truth. In fact, even Imamura’s confession that the film is a fiction is to some extent a lie. Oshima did exist and did disappear and the two sisters were real, though the Rat was paid a salary to appear in the film.
The intriguing sequel to this is the fact that Imamura went on to spend the next 10 years working exclusively on television documentaries. It’s almost as if A Man Vanishes represents a cautionary preface, an admission of the problematics before dedicating what was to be a significant chunk of his career to that strange and stained genre.
In Chekhov’s short story ‘Peasants’, a waiter from the city has fallen sick and takes his family back to his village to be looked after, and wait for death. Almost immediately he realises this is a mistake. He’s just another mouth to feed and before long his own family are making it clear to him he should hurry up and die. The cruelty of survival is similarly the focus of Shôhei Imamura’s stunning film, based on a conflation of two short stories by Shichirô Fukazawa, each of which had already been given separate film treatments. In a remote mountain village, winters are harsh and basic survival is ground out of the earth. As a result, the elderly, on reaching 70, go up the mountain to die. Granny Orin (played by the excellent Sumiko Sakamoto) is a sturdy 69 with a mouthful of her own teeth, but feels her time has come. It is partly out of respect for tradition, partly because of religious beliefs that in that way she will see her ancestors again, but also because of a not-so-subtle societal pressure: she begins to be the butt of jokes and songs about the demon hag who has 33 teeth. The memory of her husband’s disappearance still makes her feel she has lost face.
As in the Chekhov short story, there is a shocking frankness about death and the need for a society on the edge of survival to get rid of its excess baggage, even when these are your relatives. Female babies are sold to the visiting salt merchant, unwanted children are killed on birth. A new born babe that is found in the field sets off a quarrel, not about murder, but about fly-tipping: ‘I don’t need that kind of fertilizer,’ an aggrieved peasant complains. Sexual behaviour is also restricted, with only the eldest son allowed to marry and the other men having to make do with what sex they can grab. Risuke, Granny Orin’s smelly second son, makes do with the neighbour’s dog when the urge takes him.
Imamura unashamedly places the village in the context of a nature that is drippingly red in tooth and claw. As humans hunt, so do eagles, sometimes stealing the same prey; as human rut, so do frogs; as humans are cruel, so we see the murderous affections of the praying mantis. And their survival is genuinely on a knife’s edge. This is not a Malthusian abstraction, or a Logan’s Run dystopia. Each family continually keeps track of the mouths to feed and does the math. They watch as potatoes are counted out and infractions are punished with an appalling severity. ‘I wonder if we’ll survive this winter,’ one villager muses aloud.
And yet for all the harshness and difficulty this is a bizarrely beautiful film, as it follows the village through its four seasons, from winter on. The change of the light, the landscape with the dominating and death-threatening mountain as well as the fire-lit interiors are beautifully rendered, without ever appearing anything other than real.
Before going up the mountain Granny Orin needs to resolve some unfinished business. Her eldest son’s wife has died and he needs a replacement. Stinky Risuke, who uses his breath as a weapon, also needs to have some sex otherwise the neighbours are going to find out about why their dog is so unhappy. The younger son is in a relationship with a girl from a bad family, who are suspected of thieving. The fall of this family is precipitous and is anticipated by the snake that serves as their house god abandoning their hut.
The main relationship is between Granny and Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata), her eldest son. She fears he is soft-hearted, too much like his father, and he is reluctant to let her go up the mountain. It is partly to convince him that she is ageing that Orin bashes her own teeth out, the actress having her own front teeth removed for the purposes of the film with an admirable commitment to realism. However, Tatsuhei is a complex character, troubled literally by ghosts from the past, and although he might demur from carrying out a punishment one day, on another he might well participate. And in the end it will be Tatsuhei who will carry Granny Orin up to her final resting place as the first snows threaten to fall.
Imamura’s achievement here is in presenting a radically different society with values that clash directly with what we today consider universal and inalienable rights. And yet this is not of mere anthropological interest, he is neither romanticising nor patronising the villagers. There is broad comedy and deep tragedy, both the beauty and the cruel indifference of nature, tenderness, humour, love and cruelty. Our understanding of the village is never allowed the privileged position of judgement. The last 30 minutes of the film are as moving and magical as anything I’ve ever seen.
In rain-drenched pre-millennium Shibuya, Tokyo, a grotesque discovery is made, the dissected corpse of a woman, her limbs and torso bizarrely mixed with parts of a shop dummy, in a derelict apartment normally used by prostitutes. A detective (Miki Mizuno) begins to investigate.
We cut back to the life of Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka), dutiful wife of a fastidious, obsessive novelist. Her existence revolves entirely about subservience to his whims, placing his slippers for his return home just so, subject to a brutal harangue when she purchases the wrong soap. She has friends, but no real purpose or life of her own. She longs to do something before she is 30, and takes up a part-time job in a supermarket, where she is spotted by a modelling agent, and before long finds herself manoeuvred into posing for soft porn. This awakens something in her that she barely seems in control of, and she begins a double life. The slippers are still placed just so, but her daytime hours become consumed with satisfying her increasingly raging libido. She drifts, wide-eyed, into the Maruyama-cho love hotel district, and into the orbit of Mitsuko (Makoto Togashi), who becomes her mentor in the world of prostitution. A wild slide into the weirder shores of degradation and humiliation follows, going back again and again to a certain derelict apartment…
Sion Sono’s Guilty of Romance is an extraordinary film, one that’s difficult to unpack and decipher. It could be read as a right-wing patriarchal tract warning women that indulging in lust is a surefire path to hell. Except that Izumi’s husband is depicted as a cold, hypocritical gobshite, and a lot of the lusty transgressive stuff sure looks like fun. It’s largely a women’s film; the detective and all the major characters are female, and their desires push the story forward; they all look incredible and are given great scenes and dialogue; the men are mainly just, well, dicks. Despite the title, romance here is in short supply. Izumi’s husband (Kandji Tsuda) writes passionate scenes for his novels but displays no real erotic desire towards his wife. Izumi wants mainly to be wanted, but under Mitsuko’s tutelage tries to channel her desires through financial transaction. Mitsuko is revealed to be a professor of literature at a local college and gives a few intellectual justifications for her chosen path (‘Every word has flesh, the word’s meaning is its body,’ she Cronenbergs). But we aren’t sure that she believes this stuff, as the bitter relationship with her mother (Hisako Ohkata) is revealed and another Freudian minefield is opened up. Everybody’s value systems seem to be built on quicksand and given the perverse bloody mess that results, Izumi’s simple desire for sex begins to look relatively healthy.
It’s beautifully shot and composed, with chapter headings and courtly classical music that brought Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon to mind. But I couldn’t help feeling that the film went off the rails in its last hour. After setting up Izumi’s strict and strange relationship with her husband for the first half of the film Sono oddly has him disappear from the story for much of the second half, as if his function in the narrative was over for a while (crucially, we never witness his reaction to her breaking his precious routine). And while Mitsuko’s caustic conversation with her mother is a comedic high point, the final series of Norman Bates-style twisted family revelations seemed imported from a different film, and, frankly, left me baffled. I’m not sure that Guilty of Romance needed its murder mystery element at all. It’s as if Sono did not trust that the core dynamic, the spiralling relationship between Izumi and Mitsuko, was ‘extreme’ enough and would hold our attention without this giallo gloss.
Still, after catching this and the director’s previous film Cold Fish I’m convinced of the man’s talent, if not his ability to control it. This is the third part of a thematically linked ‘hate trilogy’ (Love Exposure was the first), and going off the rails seems to be what his fans expect. It’s a film I primarily watched with my jaw in my lap wondering what the hell I was going to witness next. It’s a long weird trip, but I’m not sure entirely what to take away from it, apart from a warning to avoid creepy-looking blokes in white coats and black bowlers, but I kinda knew that already.
Masaki Kobayashi, most often celebrated in the west for Kwaidan, his ghost story omnibus film, more typically made films of violent conflict reflecting his pacifist convictions. This is not as easy as it sounds.
Doing what little he could to resist Japanese militarism as a soldier in WWII, as a filmmaker Kobayashi threw himself into demonstrating the futility of armed struggle. In movies like Samurai Rebellion (1967) and 1962’s Seppuku (just released in the UK on DVD under its more common Western title, Harakiri), the director plays a cunning game, building up a cauldron of seething dramatic tension that finally explodes in a bloody climax, satisfying the demands of a genre audience who require chanbara swordplay, yet resulting in no beneficial effects, for anybody.
Crucially, Kobayashi isn’t opposed to the enjoyment of violent movies, so he doesn’t see any need to destroy audience involvement or render the battle scenes overly unpleasant with excessive gore, or unexciting via distanciation effects. His fights are stunning spectacles and absolutely thrilling to behold, especially after the hours of slow-mounting pressure that build up to them. For tales of defeat, in which not even the memory of a heroic effort will go recorded by history, these movies are surprisingly pleasurable, even at their grimmest.
What Kobayashi is opposed to, and very strongly, is the whole samurai tradition, and its continuing celebration in Japanese cinema. While some filmmakers, notably Kurosawa, were almost wholly approving of the idea of the noble warrior class, and others seem to have been largely agnostic on the subject, seeing it as purely a commercial genre element to be exploited, Kobayashi is devoted, in his period films, to destroying the pernicious myth of an honourable tradition of chivalrous combat and feudal rule. He does so mercilessly, though the tradition, here aptly embodied by an empty suit of armour, always remains at the film’s end, undefeatable. It’s a surprise to see that Shinobu Hashimoto, who adapted Yasuhiko Takiguchi’s novel, also worked on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.
This slow, savage destruction of the mythic code of the samurai is delivered via a series of flashbacks, embedded in the action to produce an illusion of indirection - in fact, the story moves as directly and ruthlessly as a sword thrust. But the ingenious structure allows an incremental build-up of tension, the weaving of several narrative lines, and a final, cataclysmic coming together of all that’s been set up, resulting in a highly cathartic outburst of action.
Along with Kobayashi’s eschewing of delicacy and ellipsis, there’s an avoidance of humour, except for the very blackest sort, embodied by Tatsuya Nakadai’s sepulchral performance. The film is deliberately heavy and sombre and truly downbeat, yet it never feels weighed down, depressing or turgid: because it’s an embodiment of the true cinematic urge, the evocation of ideas with image and sound, delivered with passion and anger by a fearless and resourceful filmmaker.
See the original before Takashi Miike’s version of the same story hits UK screens in October.
David Cairns
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
