I haven't seen his previous films yet but I picked up Raging Sun, Raging Sky mostly due to my curiosity about Armond White putting it on his Sight and Sound best of the year poll! (Don't worry I haven't gone completely nutty! I'm still avoiding Michael Jackson's This Is It - his other pick - like the plague!)
I liked it a lot. That prologue with the woman/prostitute/angel wandering through the streets and hearing the thoughts of the people around her Scanners-style was quite compelling, and her meet up with the pretty boy (I know they all get names but there's very little dialogue in the film!) who periodically lights up the film with his beaming smile seems to capture her. I love the strange Tarkovsky style indoor rain and post-sex scene of the woman putting a kind of benediction onto the young man before literally disappearing!
The main bulk of the film is the conscious and unconscious circling of the three main characters around each other, getting closer and closer to much built up meetings while having various sexual encounters separately. I get the impression that I am meant to celebrate the powerful connection between the pretty boy Ryo and the shy telephone operator Kieri, but I was much more moved by the boxer who also becomes obsessed with Ryo (but then I should point out that I've always sided more with the underdog, such as Jud Fry in Oklahoma!, and often find the smug glow around 'true lovers' rather insipid!)
After all the poor guy is a wannabe top but unfortunately keeps getting mistaken for a bottom in all his three encounters! He is also just unfortunate that he becomes obsessed with Ryo, who is obviously uninterested in him. And he certainly doesn't really deserve to be turned into the one dimensional bad guy 'kidnapping the girl' that he gets turned into in the final section!
I like the big scene of the film which takes place in the theatre (showing one of Hernández's previous films Bramadero. Which made me think that this film is meant to be shown in similar circumstances as a backdrop to encounters going on in the real theatre) and where the boxer and the pretty boy meet. We have been in the theatre before, following Kieri's and the boxer's toilet encounters, but never got further than just through the curtain into the theatre itself. On the return to the theatre we go through the lobby (the only other female character in the film other than the guardian angel figure at the opening is the person who appears to run the projector and hand out the tickets - giving these young men their passports to adventure!) and into the film screening, then through that theatre and into the bowels of the building, down into a strange derelict theatre underneath which seems to be another meeting place.
There the boy is followed by the boxer and as he gets closer they are surrounded by necking couples crowding around them - it was very amusing, and slightly heartbreaking, that at this moment that the boxer had been thinking about for so long, the two were surrounded by people just waiting for a hesitation to get in on the action themselves! When Ryo breaks free and runs off, he leaves the boxer being clawed and suffocated in the crowd, making me think of a character in a zombie film getting overwhelmed!
Despite this quite funny pay off, I found some of this is perhaps a little too overemphasised as every man in the theatre is looking back over their shoulder and cruising our main characters, reminding me a little, since Michael brought up Antonioni, of that crowd of lusting men surrounding Gloria Perkins with her torn stocking as well as Vitti's Claudia at certain points during L'Avventura!
There's the constant circling motif to the camerawork (along with regular bright blinding epiphanal white light enveloping the characters, yet also brutally exposing them and their desires, at moments of heightened connection between them), mostly seeming to be associated with the woman/angel at the beginning and the boxer at various moments of hightened tension or despair (the scene in the boxing ring is one of the most obvious, but I particularly like the scene where the boxer is alone in the dark park, having followed Kieri there to his flat but then sees Ryo in another window opposite and then is despairingly split when they both appear and go in separate directions!), a circling that gets closer and closer to the character's face until you lose all bearings of where they are in relationship to the wider environment (there are also a lot of amazing moments where one setup moves fluidly to another, or from the perspective of one character to another, within the same shot that I had to do a doubletake and remember where the camera had begun its journey!)
Compared to Ryo, who often gets filmed head on as a kind of object to be gazed and projected upon, or Kieri, who seems to be in control of the camera more (a classical hero character), those two characters of the angel and the boxer seem to constantly being equated together throughout, from the similar disorienting camerawork, to their position as onlookers to the central relationship, to the way that both the boxer and angel end up on the hill overlooking the city below during the course of the film.
And of course the final shot which to me suggests that as well as being killed in the myth, the final assault on the boxer left him dead, so he has joined the angel in watching over the boy they both were moved by so much.
Throughout the first two hours the monochrome has been punctuated by very brief lime green tinted colour sequences of the characters in a desert, sort of playing out the drama in a very cut down archetypal form. Once Ryo and Kieri finally have sex though (at the same time the boxer is forced to be submissive for what appears to be a final, fatal, time and then comes looking to claim Ryo, who despite appearances was the top in his relationship with Kieri!) the film breaks down in a Mulholland Drive manner (the Lynch film seems a particularly strong influence). The film turns to colour and we get the main title (at the two hour and thirteen minute point!) as the three men get reconfigured into a strange new world.
How to describe the final hour of the film? It is sort of as if Matthew Barney melded with Lucifer Rising and one of the Pasolini Greek myth films with a few Lord of the Rings-style pans over epic vistas and questing (albeit nude!) heroes! Throw in an English Patient style 'carried to the Palace of the Winds' sequence, the titular motif from The Virgin Spring and some Ken Russell-esque bare breasted goddesses and trippy cave visuals into the mix and it all gets quite spectacular - quite a contrast from the urban set style of the first two hours!
Quite an amazing film, and there are quite a lot of other elements to unpack - such as whether Kieri being circumcised while the other two men are not is meant to convey anything (I remember Y Tu Mama Tambien brought that aspect up of there being a class division in this practice in Mexico, so that might play into Kieri being a more classical middle/upper class hero type while the boxer is more the same class as Ryo?), or the endearing way that before sex Ryo always beams his wide smile and gives the person he's with a great big hug!
