The cinema of provocation is a development in film history that begins in the late sixties. I distinguish these kinds of movies from exploitation pictures, for instance films by Herschel Gordon Lewis (The Gore Gore Girls) or Dwaine Esper (Maniac). (The movies have always mined the vein of the horrific, violent, sadistic, and pornographic -- one of the very first pictures ever produced was Edison's tiny documentary reporting on the electrocution of an elephant.) In the sixties, auteurs who specialized in scandal first emerged. Consider, for instance, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch or, more provocatively Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the director's attempt to dramatize his rage at the industry that had spawned (and later spurned) him. For a time, Brian de Palma served as outrage auteur par excellence -- particularly with his films Body Double and Dressed to Kill. (As with Peckinpah, Body Double is a mordant blast of outrage aimed at the film industry.) Later, Quentin Tarantino assumed the role of provocateur within Hollywood-based filmmaking. In Europe, Lars von Trier took up the mantle of scandal vacated due to Fassbinder's early death. In Japan, for a time, Takashi Miike was the provocateur par excellence, specializing in torture porn and hyper-violent Yakuza pictures. Miike's role now seems to be occupied by Siano Sono, a prolific and, seemingly, highly ambitious director, who makes films designed, apparently, to induce controversy (Sono is controversial as well for his apparent penchant for sexually harassing his female actors). Sono's pictures flirt with profoundly disreputable genres in Japanese films -- he invokes the groper "up-the-skirt" movies involving voyeurism on Tokyo's crowded subways, as well as Japanese cinema's richly varied repertoire of violence and porn: Forest of Love contains lesbian school girls in cute juvenile costumes, incest, sadism, and "pink" softcore porn. What sets Sono's movies apart from mere exploitation is the director's frenzied eclecticism and his operatic attack on the sordid subject matter that he favors -- Sono is not content to show one type of perversion; instead he seems determined to cover the water front, loading his movies with something titillating for every depraved taste -- every stone he turns over has a fetish under it. Furthermore, Sono's technique is ultra-stylized, lurid, and Wagnerian -- his pictures give the impression of being febrile hallucinations with interpolated swooning music videos. About seventy minutes into Forest of Love, a garish serial killer epic, a young woman goes berserk. We see her feverishly sawing at her wrist with a piece of broken glass -- the soundtrack obliges us with a rasping sound as the girl's impromptu blade hits bone; she's wearing a Japanese school girl costume and writhing on the floor among heaps of dolls fallen from a shrine to a schoolmate who died ten years earlier after a Lesbian production of Romeo and Juliet. (We've been treated to shots of the suicidal girl earlier masturbating in front of the picture). Various apparitions appear including the dead girl dressed as Romeo. Furthermore, the soundtrack rumbles with a deep bass roar -- it sounds like an earthquake. Now and then, Sono cuts to gory shots of dead girls strewn all over an asphalt parking lot. Earlier we have seen a dance sequence scored to Pachebel's Canon, a tune that the Japanese call "The Cicada song" in which the sapphic schoolgirls flutter around calling themselves "insect women" and asserting that they will shed their adolescent form to become sexually active adults. When a young woman dressed in bondage gear (she always appears wearing a sort of leather harness) recounts an erotic story to three punks with movie cameras who squat in front of her squeezing their legs together in order to control their raging "boners" -- I'm citing the film which plays these sorts of episodes for raunchy laughs. The girl in bondage gear says that "scars are memories' and walks with a sort of club-footed limp -- the inside of her thigh is marked with a long scar that one of the kids tries to lick. And, so it goes. The film's obsessions with just barely pubescent girls, lush tableaux of nature in full bloom, and squirrely sounding pop tunes creates an effect like David Lynch on crystal methamphetamine.
As it turns out, a little bit of Sono's cinematic bad boy behavior goes a long way. The so-called "Deep Cut" version of The Forest of Love is a Netflix TV series, comprising seven episodes each about 35 minutes long. The series was compressed into a feature film, also called The Forest of Love, running about two hours and fifteen minutes; the series version is about 65 minutes longer. Apparently, the feature film is confusing and baffles most viewers. Critics who have reviewed the movie version say that it manages to be both muddled and highly repetitive. Although the TV show is slow to develop, it has a plot that makes some limited sense (if its premises are accepted) but the program also feels stalled-out -- it goes on and on and on and since the subject is mostly torture-porn, all the gratuitous dismembering and mutilating becomes not just irritating but tiresome. It's not easy to make constant graphic brutality tedious, but, somehow, Sono achieves this effect. Similarly, the school-girl lesbian stuff, featuring lots of nudity, quickly palls as well. The guy is a sort of one-trick pony who just keeps repeating himself long after the audience has figured out the point (or the pointlessness) of what he is doing.
The series involves three narrative strands that are haphazardly intercut. In 1985, a group of perky Japanese school girls perform in a production of Romeo and Juliet. Since there are no boys at the school, all parts are played by attractive teenage girls. All the girls seem to be involved in lesbian sex and the child who plays Romeo is universally desired by the other students. This subplot involves lots of sex and romantic imagery of girls kissing and declaiming Shakespeare to one another on an picturesque set with a big brooding moon, classical columns and stylized trees. A second subplot is a witless parody of a teenage snuff film -- three kids are stalked by a serial killer and murdered one after another. The kids find a scary dead body in a clearing in the forest and, then, the murderer wipes them out, taking his time because this plot, like all the series' narrative elements has to be dragged out over seven episodes. As is typical in this genre film, the kids act in a completely idiotic way, don't flee, and, in fact, venture into the danger that ends up wiping them out. (This story is supposed to take place in 1993). In 1995, a group of punks plan to make a movie. They don't have much of a story to tell until a predator named Joe Murata appears. Joe Murata is a "singer-songwriter" which in the film's alternative universe gives him a license to beat up and torture everyone he meets. Murata is posited as a incredibly charismatic -- people literally beg him to physically abuse them. The joke, which turns pretty sour after a half-dozen bloody murders, is that Murata isn't much of anything -- he's homely, arrogant, a lousy singer, and it's incomprehensible that everyone in the film worships him. (Clearly, there's some sort of perverse allegory here about Japanese sado-masochism and authority figures -- but it's hard to decipher.) Murata is a transparently phony con-man: he claims to be a Harvard graduate and a CIA operative. In one scene, he makes a call from a toilet and asserts that the peculiar metallic echoes in the sound are the result of talking to his girlfriend from a CIA "submarine." (When he leaves the toilet, he blithely tells the girl that the "sub has just surfaced.") There's some funny scenes involving Murata's incredible lies and the abuse he inflicts on everyone -- in one sequence, he raises money from an elderly professor by showing them a movie that he's produced that, he says, has made a lot of money; the movie is James Cameron's Titanic. The Tokyo punks who proclaim that "cinema is life" decide to make a film about Murata's adventures which involve seducing every woman in sight and, then, torturing them. His first victim is Moriko -- she played Juliet in the school production. Moriko claims to be a virgin and Murata enjoys raping her, burning his initials between her breasts with a cigarette, and, then, electrocuting her with two hissing prods that leave deep black burns on her hips and thighs. Moriko enjoys this action so much that she encourages her girlfriends to also have sex with Murata (he tortures them too). Ultimately, Murata is having sex with Morito's sister, Ami, and their tight-laced mother. The plot involving Murata is the main line of action and gradually evolves into a series of murders. Murata has gathered a sort of thrill-kill cult around him, but the group keeps shrinking as its members murder one another in perverse sex games or on Murata's orders. Murata tells his film-making crew to drain the blood from the bodies, hack them up, and, then, run the corpses through a blender to make corpse smoothies. The gore in the blenders is, then, rolled into little miso balls and pitched into a lake in the mountains near Fuji, presumably to be consumed by the koi. This is all shown in graphic detail and is mildly amusing, but, also, soon becomes repetitive. (In his urge to irritate, Sono has the corpses spurting arterial geysers of blood when they are cut up -- what happened to the order to first drain the bodies of their blood? In any event, I don't think a corpse is likely to spurt blood -- I believe the effluvia would be more of a slow seep.) When he tires of ultra-violence, Sono cuts back to the story about the lesbian schoolgirls, a plot that he seems to view as a romantic, lush and erotic counterpoint to all the hacking and electrocuting in the Murata story. But the narrative involving the sexy sapphic schoolgirls also involves lots of self-mutilation, weird sexual acts, and about five suicides. ("Romeo" is killed in a car crash and the mourning girls in the Shakespeare play drink a sleeping potion and, then, stand on a ledge five stories over the parking lot, dropping off the roof to be smashed to death on the asphalt below. One of the girls, Taeko, survives although with a badly shattered femur and she becomes a "super slut" who has sex with everyone -- she has the word "Romeo" tattooed on her thigh over the surgical scar resulting from the open reduction of her femur fracture. This motif rhymes with Joe Murata burning his name into Moriko's chest.) Moriko, the sole survivor of the mass suicide, has a Gothic home-life -- her father is a brutal professor who is always slapping her around. (Everyone slaps everyone else around in this movie -- there's a funny scene in which Murata performs with his hapless boy-band; all the musicians have badly bruised faces from being continuously cuffed and pummeled by Murata. Murata is a singer-songwriter the same way that Nero was a singer-songwriter, amusing himself on his lyre while Rome burned.) As the show limps forward, all of its characters get tortured and, then, slaughtered. About half of them get cut up and reduced to meat milk-shakes. The film-makers, whose crew gets smaller and smaller as they are murdered, claim to be influenced by the Coen brothers and some of the sequences have the visual flair shown by the American moviemakers -- there are parodies, I think, of Miller's Crossing in the staging of some of the shots. There's also a shout-out to Alex Cox' Sid and Nancy -- that film is portrayed as the modern punk correlate to Romeo and Juliet. I laughed out loud at one sequence in which Murata, after beating everyone up, regales his bruised posse with sales pitches for futons.
The three plot-lines intersect but not in an interesting way. By the third episode, I had figured out how the characters relate to one another and from that point on the film hasn't got any surprises. It's just gets more and more nasty and gory. Sono conceals the lack of substance in the film with jokes and gruesome violence -- the film's central conceit is funny but insufficient to support a series of this length: the supposedly charismatic Murata isn't charismatic at all; everyone treats him as a kind of God, but he's just a ruthless narcissist who spends a lot of time zapping people with his electrical prods and licking girl's faces. At the end, the movie comes to screeching halt as Moriko reads a lengthy confession in which she admits that she was never the virginal figure that she claimed to be -- Murata seems genuinely puzzled; he apparently thought he was the only egregious liar and con-artist in the group. By this point, the viewer doesn't care. Moriko has already killed her parents, disemboweled them and fed the entrails to a blender and, so, where do we go from here? (Murata has turned Moriko's staid parents into a nightmare version of Sid and Nancy and it's mildly amusing to seem them cavorting around drunkenly to punk music.)
By coincidence, a friend shared with me a video documenting a Japanese genre called Harajuku Kawaii. Kawaii means "cute' in the somewhat nauseating manner of Japanese anime and fashion -- little girls in pastel frocks with enormous wide eyes and bee-sting lips. These asexual creatures apparently are ubiquitous on the streets of Tokyo and its fashion malls. The Harajuku aspect of this style involves a recognition that this cuteness is "terminal" in some respects -- in other words, practitioners of Harajuku Kawaii blend their cute costumes and accessories with references to death, suicide, and self-harm. Japan has always had suicide rates far exceeding other countries and the samurai phenomenon was, in large part, a death cult so the general impulse behind Harajuku Kawaii isn't completely surprising -- however, the grotesque way that these cute kid-suicides appear is a little disconcerting. (The Forest of Love probably refers to the famous "suicide forest" in the Fujiyama foothills where kids go to kill themselves in the solitude of the dark, labyrinthine woods.) Clearly, the Romeo and Juliet pastiche in Forest of Love with its not-so-virgin suicides is a lurid expression of Harajuku Kawaii. Furthermore, Japan produces scores of "Pink" movies each year -- these are erotic films featuring torture and humiliation, a mainstay of the Japanese adult film industry. Sono seems to be fusing the Pink film with anime-influenced Harajuku Kawaii -- at least, I think what's at work here. Like Oshima, Sono seems to think that Japanese people are in thrall to an authority-based irrational death cult. But Forest of Love doesn't criticize this phenomenon -- it celebrates it.
I watch these films so you don't have to.
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