MIFF Session 11: WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL?

A 4X3 frame within the widescreen opens on a gaudy toothpaste ad with a cute little girl in white singing a toxically catchy jingle. Not too much later she skips into her palatial home, removing her shoes at the door and springs into the living room which has the deepest red carpet you have ever seen. Except it's shiny. Except she's ankle deep in it and her frilly white lace socks are now the same red. She slips and skids through the saloon doors to the next room which is filled with the bodies of hacked up Yakuzas. The only one alive tells the girl that her mother kicks arse. The girl takes it in her stride. Her father is the boss of her neighbourhood's Yakuza gang. She's seen this kind of thing before.

Snaking through this is her father overseeing not only his gang but the changing of the madam ceremony at one of his brothels as a pair of tradies change the neon sign outside reflecting this. A gang of teen would-filmmakers calling themselves the Fuck Bombers roam the streets looking for true life action, finding the bloodied Yakuza form my first par staggering away from the scene. After he, flattered, agrees to be filmed  the movie gang go to a local shrine and pray to the Movie God that they will break through. The mother of the little girl chases another Yakuza who got away with the kitchen knife she used on the others, dispatches him on an overhead walkway and turns herself in, intimidating the cop in the mini station to get some back up to make a proper arrest. A title tells us that this happened "about ten years ago." We are in a Sion Sono movie and we are not going to escape until the end credits.

But we won't want to. Its two hours, nine minutes on screen feel like about forty-five minutes.

About ten years later the Yakuza mother is about to be released from prison and is expecting the feature film that her husband has promised to make about their daughter who has run away following a bloody raid from a rival gang and has collared Koji who had (age appropriately) lusted after her as the kid in the commercial. The Fuck Bombers sit around in the now closed cinema where they used to hang and repeatedly watch the impressive trailer for the feature film they never made. Their action hero who wanted to be a Yakuza is so disenchanted that he pines to go full time on his waiting job in a restaurant. The gang who were so solidly dispatched all that time ago are now led by a man who has insisted on a traditional approach to gangsterism involving swords and kimonos. He is also smitten with the girl from the ad whom he met about ten years back. He is now ready to annihilate the rival gang led by the girl's father. Oh, the girl is now twenty, bratty and beautiful and only kind of wants to be a movie star. Her Roman Holiday flight from the fold will bring everyone together in a series of plot twists so bonkers that they create an immunity to plot hole pickers. And we're only about an hour in.

Sion Sono, whose career defies categorisation, has crafted a kind of wrap party for 35 mm film production and provides a pageant of Japanese cinema history and its ready use of extreme violence (always well in advance of the West) as Yakuza and Samurai battle both cartoonishly and confrontingly. But while that is  the case it is mercifully free of the puppyish eagerness of a Tarantino. QT would never do something like the broken glass farewell kiss that Mitsuko gives halfway through; it takes a very special mind to invent that. Sono has intentionally subverted and even jettisoned narrative structure when he's got interested in other elements but when he's on as a storyteller every frame is pressed into service. Almost all the performances here are a notch below the hysteria that would implode them. Now and then a cute moment, sure, but it's always set among scenes with shark teeth.

Sono again weaves wonders with a highly eclectic mix of music (mostly sourced) and stocks with various quality levels of video happily trading screen time with the gorgeous 35 mm images, going from highschool noise to Kubrickian splendour. He is a modern master and all I wish for him is that he keeps doing whatever the hell he wants to.

Fuck Bombers forever! Yataaaaai!

MIFF session 12: Guilty of Romance

Two detectives find a bizarrely arranged body in a rainy alley in Tokyo's red light district. What at first looks like the corpse of a murdered prostitute becomes sections of  a woman's body with parts of a mannequin replacing what has been taken from the body. Another corpse, identically arranged is found in a nearby low rent apartment. The two complete a single body ... almost. The head, hands and genitalia have not been recovered.
Izumi is a young housewife who perfects the details of her husband's domestic life. Her constant rearrangement of his house slippers in the moments before his entrance looks like OCD at first but when he comes through the door and inserts his feet into them he congratulates her on their positioning. "You're improving," he tells her. She blushes and bows, delighted. The evening passes from the silence that accompanies his reading, through a sexless marriage bed, to the morning's parting ritual which will be reversed at the end of the day.

He is a writer of popular but trashy sex novels which we see him reading before adoring fans. She is allowed a career at the local supermarket pushing rubbish from the frozen goods section on to listless shoppers (you know her from your own supermarket whenever you politely refuse the satay chilli egg solutions sizzling on the grill as a host of cold ones lie scattered on a paper plate....anyway....) Here she is spotted by a pinku agent who coaxes her into a more lucrative career which occasions what seems to be her life's first orgasm.

Radient (everyone is saying so) with a new taste for the nasty and flavoursome she ventures into the realm of the Love Hotel and there meets a pimp who at first seems to be a street performer and, through him, Mitsuko, a wild and ageing beauty who promises an even more lucrative career than before. These two get on from the word go. Just as she had radiated admiration at her husband's readings she now does as much at her new mentor and friend's daytime work, lecturing in poetry at the local elite university.

The journey from here to the corpse of the opening is intriguing and pacey. As always with a Sion Sono film, for each splash of hedonism we get some extra depth as a counterweight. The everpresent theme of identity returns but here is given new faces as these two women's lives and wishes twine with increasing tightness. Central to this is the notion of women empowering themselves through sexual allure: is it buying in or playing strings?

Sono is often described as a transgressive filmmaker but I think that does him a disservice. As his control over his medium has visibly increased so has his power to metre his content. What once was shock value is now more firmly contextualised and so more powerful  (the violence of this and Cold Fish bear witness). If he was a bad boy once his excesses have led him to become a wise man.

MIFF session 6: Cold Fish

WOOO HOO! Now we're cookin'
"You think of the earth as a small blue dot. I think of it as a cluster of rocks"
So screams Murata San to Shamoto San as the former stands over the film's first murder victim who is still choking to death. Here endeth the lesson. Well, not quite.

(Shamoto, who runs a) LITTLE (tropical) FISH (shop) MEETS (Murata who runs a) BIG (tropical) FISH (emporium). Shamoto's life is small and low on function. His daughter is a tearaway and hates his new wife who has grown cold on him. Called in one night to a supermarket to represent the daughter who has been caught shoplifting, the couple are desolate and expect the worst in this latest of minor atrocities enacted by her. Then Mr Murata influences his way into the scene and charms the supermarket manager out of pressing charges. He then charms the unglued family to see his bigger and better shop. It's the big business version of their own dowdy place and they are humbled and excited by it. Mr Murata suggests giving Mitsuko (daughter) a job to keep her honest and start her earning.

Things already aren't looking quite right with the appearence of the burningly sexual Taiko (Murata's wife). Mitsuko goes to work in the Murata uniform and when her father goes to check on her and visit the family saviour he is treated to the scene I started with above. One step and he's an accomplice. The corpse is dismembered (in more senses than one, though it's offscreen) and rendered ...elemental and cast to nature. Mr Shamoto didn't know he was weak until he met Mr Murata. Now he does, how will he cope with the knowledge and what can he do about it?

This is a non-Yakuza gangster story based on a much smaller story from the news. Sono, as he did with Suicide Circle, Noriko's Dinner Table and Strange Circus, brings his own vision to the table. This outing is visually restrained (as Noriko was) by comparison. These are the deep waters of a character study and would only be muddied by the flamboyance of Suicide Circle or Strange Circus. Sono uses 35 mm filmstock and sticks with it, favouring a plain optical tone until the setpieces towards the climax demand more. As usual, he draws strong perfomances from his cast and takes his audience to the far side of crazy to the point where even those chortling nervously are equally in the spirit as those who gasp in horror. At some points the only response entirely individual. Seeing it at a packed Greater Union tonight, this phenomenon was both disconcerting and thrilling.
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As with all his films, however far into gaspingly violent mayhem he can take us, Sono never loses sight of morality and doesn't mind showing how ghastly its face can get. This story of a weak man who finds his strength when forced is pushed far beyond the shadows on a multiplex screen, however strong they might be. Morality bends, warps and acts like it's on the same acid that Hendrix took at Woodstock but, unlike the Tarrantino or Ritchie gangster comedies, it never surrenders to nihilism, however close it comes. This is exhilarating cinema!

Screening note: I sat in my usual third from front row centre. At the point of the feature starting, as those around me cool talked into their moblies, saving seats and closing off anodyne chats, a huge guy sat a knight's move away from me. The moment he removed his jacket I caught a gust of the worst B.O. I've ever smelt outside of a friend of mine who went for weeks at a time claiming that nature was its own soap. A thick, almost staining acrid stench. He managed to clear a near perfect circle of seats around him and reminded me of photographs of the devastation of the forests at Tunguska.