by Jason Suzuki
The pink film, or the Roman Porno as the Nikkatsu-produced titles were called, was a training ground for many filmmakers who would go on to acclaim and success, some being regarded as masters programmed regularly at the world’s top festivals. In exchange for a requirement to consistently show skin, filmmakers were given pretty much free reign in regards to the rest of the film. This year saw the unveiling of a new Nikkatsu project infinitely more exciting than the now defunct Sushi Typhoon label: the Roman Porno Reboot project. Instead of five up-and-coming filmmakers Nikkatsu break that tradition in exchange for five established artists to attach to this new project. The rest of the rules stayed the same though. As long as there’s some sex about every ten minutes nothing was off limits. Two of the five were shown at this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival: the self-aware fun of Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind and the barrage to the senses that is Sion Sono’s Anti-Porno.
More in the tradition of Brecht and Wakamatsu than your typical soft-core offerings from their heyday, Sono’s Anti-Porno lives up to its title, which apparently was Sono’s only requirement if he was going to accept Nikkatsu’s offer. Still somehow managing to retain the enfant terrible title despite his success – he is a festival regular and Shinjuku Swan was a big box office earner in Japan – this project ended up with Sono turning in one of his most intellectually exciting works. The Whispering Star is still his supreme work of the past few years, eschewing his usual manic fun for a calm, meditative experience, Anti-Porno may prove to be just as polarizing given its ideological focus. For a man who has given so many up-skirt shots in both passion projects and paycheck projects, Sono takes a more critical stance of the genre, relating it to women’s role in society, not just in works of fiction.
We start out in a studio apartment, the majority of it painted a bright yellow while the bathroom is entirely red. The majority of our time will be in this room which feels like an homage to a section of Cleo from 5 to 7. Kyoko (Ami Tomite) is a successful artist whose method of novel writing incorporates visually realizing her characters on full sized canvas, laid out across one of her walls in an otherwise spare set. Scantily clad, she floats around the apartment, haunted by a sexual mania. When her thoughts climax she races for the toilet to vomit, sort of her form of bodily fluid release.
The film is mainly a one-woman show with the occasional appearances from her specter of a sister who appears from time to time, playing a piano not really there. Thus the music is both diegetic and not so, an edge the movies applies to most aspects. Noriko (Mariko Tsutsui) is the meek assistant who meets each of Kyoko's demands which are increasingly demeaning. Soon after is Kyoko's interview/photo shot with a group of art world elites, strap-ons and all. Then we hear "Cut!" and it's here that the movie starts to resemble something more along the lines of F for Fake as it eschews narrative for collage, and moans for ideas (mostly).
Kyoko is not just Kyoko but a character in her own movie. If Six Characters in Search of an Author was a general look at the roles we play and the scenes we must bear repetition of, Anti-Porno is this applied absurdist concept applied just to women. At home Kyoko has dinner with her sister and her horny parents. Looking up she sees a buzz-saw dividing the ceiling, or the ceiling of a set. This is how Sono visualizes the moment we realize our roles are decided and thus our worlds constructed. Tomite gracefully switches between Kyoko's fear of repeating, and failing, the same scene over and over again and the bravado of Kyoko the artist. But the expectation to deliver this fantasy wears her down to the point when characters and character within characters blend and the artifice is increasingly difficult to maintain.
While I have only seen two of the five entries in Nikkatsu's reboot series, this is easily some of the most exciting stuff they have produced since Seijun Suzuki was upsetting their higher ups. We have been enjoying a stream of passion projects from Sono these past few years so it's a nice surprise that an almost reluctant for-hire project got his wheels turning to this degree. You will be exhausted by the end of this as once it grabs your train of thought it refuses to let go and it will kick and scream and blare its piano so you don't look away.
Jason Suzuki is co-editor of Cinema Adrift.