colinr0380 wrote:And Film4 are premiering the very strange-looking film
R100 on Sunday 24th August at 11.15 p.m., which isn't due to be released by Yume Pictures (on DVD only) until 15th September! Starring Nao Omori (who is probably best known in the West for playing Ichi from Ichi The Killer).
Spoilers:
Um, wow, this was an utterly insane bondage-cum-comedy film. To describe this film think sort of Audition meets The Game, but instead of turning into a horror or thriller film this becomes a very strange broad comedy!
Our main character is a salaryman who visits a bondage club that specialises in randomly throwing domineering women at him during his daily life. You have to sign up for a year and can't get out of the contract early, which really should have set the alarm bells ringing straight away! The early sections of this film play quite low key but also with moments of amusement, as the dramatic scenes showing our lead's family life with young son and grandfather taking care of him, his sales assistant job in a furniture store, and his visits to his comatose wife in the hospital, alternate with various women attacking him on the street or in a sushi restaurant!
The juxtaposition in these early scenes is extremely amusing and I felt as if I could understand why someone would get involved in this kind of club to add a bit of unpredictability and excitement to their life, along with a kind of self-castigation for their passivity.
There is also that weird CGI ripple effect that various characters have happen to them at moments of pure excitement, which seemed as if it were tying in with various other characters breaking off in mid-flow to check if an earthquake was going on, before getting back to business. I wonder if the suggestion there was that there were so many people having all these 'ripples of satisfaction', raptures of self loss, or sexual climaxes, whatever they were, that they were actually what was causing all the earthquakes in the world!
So to this point the film wasn't exactly down to earth, but it did seem grounded and surprisingly touching. Then comes the next half...
The disappointment comes early, in the way that inevitably suddenly the domineering women start invading the main character's home life and workplace (with a hilarious moment as he is being whipped in the toilets of his workplace, begging for mercy and to stop before anyone walks in, for the woman to break off whipping for a moment to allow someone who was in the stall the chance to leave!). This is where the film jumps into psychological thriller territory, as we get visits to the police who cannot do anything because a contract was signed, and our lead character's life slowly gets ruined. I found this disappointing as during the first section of the film I had been waiting for this inevitable turn of events and was sad to see it arrive in the wake of showing how the bondage club actually did seem to be helping our character!
Anyway after an amusing but kind of disgusting sequence involving "the Queen of Saliva" spitting various fluids at our trussed up character ends with a bizarrely edited music video dance number and an unfortunate miscalculation of the stability of the bannister of some stairs to hold the dominatrix's weight, suddenly the entire bondage club is on the warpath demanding vengeance on both our lead and the rest of his family. This is where the film goes from crazy to outright insane...
...at this point though I should mention the great third-wall breaking moments (did they happen in real life as well?) in which a group of film critics?/film producers?/financiers? tumble out of a screening of the film in progress and debate all of the current action in steadily more despairing tones. I particularly loved the guy who points out all of the plot flaws up to this point (particularly how they knew how to mimic the comatose wife's voice so precisely, which had annoyed me five minutes previously!) and destroys the film but is powerless in the face of the director apparently being 100 years old and it being his 'signature visionary work' that he had been aiming towards all his career! I wonder if there is a bit of a cheeky jab at a Kaneto Shindo or Seijun Suzuki in the 'elderly, kinky director' characterisation!...
...back to the film, which at this point has gone off on a free associative track all of its own. Our lead has lost his son in the woods somewhere, his father has been literally eaten whole by "the Queen of Gobbling" like the grandmother in Red Riding Hood, a couple of dominatrices get shot in the head whilst relaxing around a kitchen table with a couple of Pot Noodles, and we get ever more bizarre cutaways to the bondage club that seems to involve a giant pool in which the dominatrices lounge around in full leather gear like swimsuit bunnies! Particularly funny are the ladies in the black leather rubber rings gliding about aimlessly in the middle of the pool (the film falls apart again for another atrium break at this point so the financier/critic/executive can rant about where the hell a pool came from!)
Eventually everything climaxes once the foul mouthed, ranting, American CEO of the bondage club arrives by private jet, lets off pent up steam by doing a few angry belly flops into the pool (think a chubbier Courtney Love - perhaps the most believable depiction of a CEO in all of cinema!) and begins to supervise like a samurai general a charge of (robot?) ninja dominatrixes in a Night of the Living Dead style isolated farmhouse assault in which our hero conveniently finds a stash of hand grenades. He also ends up destroying his father's well tended garden full of cabbages too, which was mentioned as being his pride and joy early on in the film, though I'm not sure whether there is meant to be any irony in having done that!
This siege ends with our lead being dragged off into a shed by the neck by the American CEO, after which a voice over talks about masochism and domination being the same thing, one giving birth to the other, and the ripples from earlier return, start playing on musical stave on the side of the shed and eventually start playing the Ode To Joy! (Slavoj Zizek would be aghast at this film!)
And THEN, we get an even more bizarre sequence of what I can only describe as a weirdly specific parody of those pregnant Demi Moore fashion shoot spreads, as our male hero poses delightedly with his young son for a fashion photographer proudly displaying his eight month pregnancy bump!
An utterly crazy film. I was a bit disappointed that the film goes into such bizarre territory after a fascinating first third or so, and I never found the wacky stuff as purely hilarious as I did the sight of our lead character wandering home, then suddenly lying on the street being kicked by a lady in leather gear, then picking himself up and dejectedly wandering off again! But I was glad that the hackneyed 'psychological thriller' aspect that turns up halfway through immediately gets negated by the spiral into insane wildness that almost immediately follows! I'm not entirely sure either that after the first 45 minutes or so the film has much to say about domination or submission (is even the threat of the final sections of the film, like The Game, all simply staged for his benefit as part of the service?), or why people get involved in such, but it was an interesting journey to take.
And I loved the meta-sections! Of course post end credits there is a brief scene of the small group in the atrium of the cinema again, just dumbfounded and bewildered (and seemingly exasperated!) by everything they've witnessed!