Tag Archives: Sion Sono

Anti-Porno

anti-porno
Anti-Porno

Seen at L’Étrange Festival, Paris (France)

Format: Cinema

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Cast: Ami Tomite, Mariko Tsutsui

Japan 2016

76 mins

Sion Sono diverts Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno Reboot into a subversively playful and multi-layered take on the female condition.

The 2016 edition of the Etrange Festival offered audiences the chance to see two of the five films commissioned by Nikkatsu for their 100th anniversary, as part of the Roman Porno Reboot Project. Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind was labelled by Nikkatsu as ‘Battle’, and Sion Sono’s Anti-Porno as ‘Art’. The latter director is a regular at the festival, as there has hardly been a year without at least one Sion Sono film programmed.

Anti-Porno starts in an Almodóvar-like colourful flat, in bright blue, yellow and red, with young Kyoko naked (but for her panties) dancing to her ghost-sister’s rendition of Offenbach’s ‘Nuit d’amour’, after a particularly boozy night. Unlike his earlier contemplative I Am Keiko (Keiko desu kedo, 1997), where the action (or the lack of it) was confined to an unrealistic red-painted flat fitted with yellow-painted appliances, so as to focus on the passing of time, the frantically paced Anti-Porno is rather a reflection on confinement and on the impossibility of real freedom, as the leitmotiv of a living lizard inside a whisky bottle reminds us constantly.

Every detail in this room feels artificial and exaggerated, while the film becomes more and more hysterical, as the versatile artist Kyoko becomes more and more sadistic with her assistant. Kyoko eventually has her bleeding and then raped during an interview that she gives to lesbian fashionista journalists. And just when we tell ourselves that this is really too much and too kitschy, so does the director, who orders the scene to be cut. Once the suspension of disbelief has been shattered, Sion Sono plays with endlessly embedding successive layers of reality, as he did with parallel worlds in Tag.

Sion Sono loves metaphors and, as in most of his films, he can’t get enough. Both the flat and the bottle stand for the virgin/whore dichotomy, to which Kyoko finds herself confined by the world of men. Sion Sono also adds another layer, using butterflies escaped from a biology book and trapped under a schoolroom ceiling to denounce the glass ceiling still blocking Japanese women. Yet Kyoko’s several soliloquies do not do justice to the film’s clever, manifold levels of perception and reality, concluding on one final and rather trivial aphorism: ‘Men’s world is shit, men’s dreams are shit… Porno is shit’. Why did Sion Sono opt for such an obvious and direct address? Was it because the film was a commission for Nikkatsu? Because he had already perfected the poetic treatment of the female condition in Japan in his previous films? Or because he feared he had not been fully understood so far? For, despite a few delightfully funny scenes, among which the bourgeois family dinner conversation on genitalia certainly ranks highest, Sion Sono gets excessively serious here. One has the impression that Anti-Porno moves from a form of criticism to that of a manifesto, bringing hope in the wake. In Tag, Mitsuko’s only solution was seppuku; in Anti-Porno, though Kyoko’s sister chooses death too, in the final scene we leave Kyoko writhing on the floor in gallons of paint, obsessively seeking ‘an exit’.

Pierre Kapitaniak

Love & Peace

Love Peace1
Love & Peace

Format: Blu-ray, DVD + VOD

Seen at LFF 2015

Release date: 11 July 2016

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Cast: Hiroki Hasegawa, Toshiyuki Nishida, Kumiko Aso

Japan 2015

117 mins

Sion Sono has made an insanely warped family film about a rock star and a turtle.

Brace yourselves, folks. Sion Sono has made a Christmas family film, albeit one that may well traumatise any children who come in contact with it. Love & Peace tells the story of Kyo (Hiroki Hasegawa), an office drone whose youthful dreams of rock stardom have long since withered. He is now such a pathetic loser that his life is the subject of derision on morning TV – although this may or may not be a dream sequence. One lunch break he buys a turtle from a vendor on a park bench, names it Pikadon, and immediately treats it as his only friend and confidante, telling the turtle all his hopes and desires: to be in a band, have a hit song, play in the Tokyo Olympic stadium. But when his co-workers find Pikadon on him the next day, their mockery drives him to flush it down the toilet, where it follows the currents to wind up at a kind of Land of Misfit Toys deep in the sewers, presided over by a boozy wizard (Toshiyuki Nishida). He grants Pikadon magical powers, and thus Kyo, stricken with remorse over his actions, starts to have his wishes granted: he becomes a Spiders-era Bowie-esque star, on his way to the top, but Pikadon is growing in size with every wish.

As that précis probably reveals, Sono’s latest is not the easiest film to sum up. It feels decidedly sick and strange without actually crossing the line into something taboo or transgressive. It’s glossy-looking and has a budget, but the actual experience of watching it is abrasive; for much of the running time we’re watching shonky puppets with squeaky voices interacting with unsubtle human performers, while in the background that parping march from Walter Carlos’s soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange alternates with the horrifically catchy title tune over and over again. For long stretches the film lacks forward momentum, essentially spinning its wheels before it gets to where we know it’s headed. The Sewer of Misfit Toys is a candy-coloured nightmare of live animals and busted merchandise, run by a kindly old man with worrying Charles Manson/Jim Jones parallels. The outside world seems to be full of cruel idiots. And our lead character is pretty hard to like. In fact, Sono seems to want us to despise his hero. I’ve never been fond of the word ‘snivelling’, but Kyo actively snivels in the early stages as an office worker, when he’s not being a delusional gurning man-child at home, a screeching loon in the street and finally an egomaniacal prick when he attains stardom. What fellow worker Yuko (Kumiko Aso) sees in him is hard to understand.

How much of this annoyance is intentional, and what the hell Sono means by it, is, as usual, hard to say. I have the feeling that someone who was more au fait with current Japanese pop culture might get more out of it. Whatever: there are sizeable chunks of Love & Peace where it sits on the right side of ‘delightfully deranged’ and delivers. I suspect that my face sported a sizeable grin for the moments when my head wasn’t buried in my hands. And the climax is a jaw-dropping thing, wherein a glitter-suited feather-cut Kyo stomping around the stadium stage is intercut with full-on Kaiju action as a Gojira-sized Pikadon goes on a slow-moving rampage through Tokyo’s streets under the obligatory assault of the armed forces, on his way to a reunion with his master. The rest… Well, it manages to be both sweet and creepy, Sono eschewing his customary sex and violence but still ending up somewhere… unhealthy. It feels like warped children’s birthday entertainment, like… How’s this? Like a clown on misdiagnosed prescription medication putting on a puppet show with stuff he’s pulled from the wreckage of a plane crash. There you go. Fill your boots, and, y’know, Merry Christmas…

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2015 coverage.

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Tokyo Tribe

Tokyo Tribe
Tokyo Tribe

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Based on the manga by: Santa Inoue

Cast: Akihiro Kitamura, Tomoko Karina, Hitomi Katayama, Ryôhei Suzuki, Nana Seino

Japan 2014

116 mins

A Jap hip hop gangsta musical, Sion Sono’s latest is set in an alternative Tokyo where the rival gangs that rule the city’s outer districts have been maintaining an uneasy truce for years, until, over the course of one night, a murky conspiracy is set in motion to set clan against clan and bring war to the streets. Can the various antagonistic pimps, hustlers, strippers, dealers and loved up teens overcome their differences, beat the bad guys and restore peace?

Of course they bloody can. This isn’t a film of murky moral complexity, this is an exhilarating, garish manga-based phantasmagoria, much more concerned with giving us a wild ride than with such fripperies as plot or storytelling or making a whole lot of sense. Filmed largely in fluid roaming steadicam takes that must have taken an age to set up and choreograph, Tokyo Tribe is a feast of outrageous action against over-the-top set design. The screen is full of scantily clad gyrating girls and splattery ultra-violence, when it’s not full of eccentrically dressed MC’s telling you what’s up. Rather than giving us anything authentically human, most of the actors are channelling hip hop archetypes, exemplified by Riki Tekeuchi’s utterly grotesque turn as chief bad guy Lord Buppa, a leering, groping cannibal king in a gold Elvis suit, eyeballs rolling so far back in his head it suggests he’s permanently overdosing on elephant tranquilisers.

If all this sounds like a blast, well, it is, up to a point, but after the first 20 minutes or so a certain repetitiveness creeps in. Once again, there’s the feeling with Sion Sono that he’s not really in control of his material. He’s having too much fun to be concerned with consistency of tone, or getting over characters and story. The result is a whole lot of cool stuff that doesn’t really slow down or speed up or build. Whilst it’s never boring, irritations creep in. The various ‘tribes’ are introduced to us over and over again, whilst the evil plot at the centre of the tale is left largely unexplained. A military tank is introduced with much fanfare only to be utterly forgotten about. A dick size joke that should, at best, have been a throwaway gag is allowed to take over the final moments of the film. Elements don’t gel; at times it plays like a Rooney/Garland ‘let’s put on a show right here’ flick, at others like Tinto Brass’s Caligula. The ‘one love’ vibe that ends the movie doesn’t fit with the fetishised weaponry and wall-to-wall arse- kicking. The colourful cartoon fun stylings don’t sit well with the rape and torture scenes.

Sure, some of these glaring contradictions may be part of the hip hop culture Sono is representing. But like a rapper yelling ‘Peace! Out!’ after a set filled with Glock-wielding revenge fantasies and badass bragging… well, you find yourself wishing for a little more self-awareness and self-control. The sexual politics especially are pretty horrible, from the opening scene where a naïve female cop is stripped to the waist to be used as a map of Tokyo by knife-wielding bad boy Mera (Ryôhei Suzuki, who, frankly, did not die enough) practically all the film’s female characters are used as squealing eye candy, when they aren’t being used as kung fu kicking eye candy: it’s a rare shot of female lead Nana Seino that doesn’t feature the gusset of her white panties.

Still, the music by B.C.D.M.G throbs and pulses effectively, and it has energy to burn. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. But I’m still waiting for Sono to give us the undeniably great, mad film that he clearly has the chops to deliver. Tokyo Tribe: big fun on screen, bad taste in mouth. Peace. Out.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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The Land of Hope

The Land of Hope
The Land of Hope

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 26 August 2013

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Cast: Isao Natsuyagi, Naoko Otani

Original Title: Kibou no Kuni

Japan 2012

133 mins

From offbeat horror oddities such as Exte: Hair Extension (2007), where various victims are attacked by their hairstyles, and the epic story of love, religion and panty-shot photography that is Love Exposure (2009), to the brutal dystopia of Himizu (2011), Japanese director Sion Sono has gained a formidable reputation for having an exceptionally unique approach to filmmaking. The Land of Hope is a slight departure from his usual extremes, without being completely bereft of his surreal sense of humour and the occasional excursion into overtly symbolic imagery.

Throughout this poignant domestic drama, Sono succeeds in achieving a restrained and proficient balance between naturalism and the visually poetic as he tackles head on a monumental disaster and its tragic repercussions. The only problem with the film is his overbearing use of classical music, which often feels cheap and unnecessary. But skillfully avoiding spectacle, the director’s heartfelt authenticity is unquestionable, making this his most accessible and personal film to date.

This review was first published as part of our Terracotta 2013 coverage.

Robert Makin

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Exte: Hair Extensions

Exte

Format: DVD

Release date: 14 July 2008

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Director: Sion Sono

Writers: Masaki Adachi, Sion Sono

Original title: Ekusute

Cast: Chiaki Kuriyama, Ren Osugi, Megumi Satô

Japan 2007

108 mins

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.

John Berra

Himizu

Himizu

Format: Cinema – UK premiere

Screening date: 15 April 2012

Venue: Prince Charles

Distributor: Third Window Films

Part of the Terracotta Far East Film Festival

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Based on the manga by: Minoru Furuya

Cast: Shôta Sometani, Fumi Nikaidô, Tetsu Watanabe

Japan 2011

129 mins

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.

The Terracotta Far East Film Festival runs from April 13 to 15 at the Prince Charles, London.

John Bleasdale

Guilty of Romance

Guilty of Romance

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 September 2011

Venue: Key cities

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Original title: Koi no tsumi

Cast: Miki Mizuno, Makoto Togashi, Megumi Kagurazaka

Japan 2011

144 mins

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.

Mark Stafford