GIVE IT TO ME!

                                                

Cult maverick director and writer Sion Sono’s, Love Exposure (2008 Japan), is a indulgent, obsessive, and sexual film with its mix match of perversion, violence, and religion surrounding a coming of age story which takes it audience on an emotional journey.

 Supposedly based on true life story of his friend, Sono explores the transition of Yu (Takahiro Nishijima), an innocent and puerile son of a catholic priest whose main goal in life is to fulfil the last request of his Mother, to find his “Maria”, as she presents him with the statue of the Virgin Mary. However when his Father forces him to confession daily, Yu decides he has to regularly sin in enable to keep his Father happy. With hilarious attempts at bad behaviour, Yu finds his sinful destiny by discovering a mentor in the art of kung fu up the skirt, panty photography, soon becoming the king of sin, not forgetting his alter ego as cross dressing Miss Scorpion, he has to deal with the percussions of his new perverse lifestyle.

The film explores the sexuality and fetishistic nature of individuals, specifically Yu as he attempts to gain his first erection, he is advised by his mentor to “Become a erect with your heart”. It is only on the appearance of man hating school girl Yoko(Hikari Mitsushima, the actress stars  in “Kakera – a piece of our life”), whilst she takes on a gang of men in the name of Jesus Christ, that he experiences his first love and sexual stimulation. I would like to add this is whilst Yu is dressed as a woman, which he describes as liberating, resulting in Yoko falling in love with Miss Scorpion unaware that it is cross dressing Yu. The exploration of Yoko’s homosexuality in the framework of Catholism is representative not only of the paradigms of thinking of an older generation but also the socio cultural restraints on individuals particularly the young female. The brilliant Sakura Ando (Momoko Ando’s sister) plays Koike, a beautiful, evil and manipulative teenager who plots to recruit Yu and his Catholic family into the cult of church zero. Both female characters are both representative of how females are not victims, but survivors as they both have endured abusive relationships with their fathers with a lack of a Mother’s guidance. Yoko and Koike are parallel to each other, as their ordeals are identical it shows how individuals deals differently with the past , whereas Koike castrates her father, becomes a powerful member of a Cult and spends most of her time stalking Yu and plotting to entice, Yoko leaves her abusive household and spends most of her time beating up grown men. 

The film does has the essence of Sono-esq gore within it, however it is not as dark or as extreme as his past work such as “Suicide circle” (2001) (The film that made the western world take notice of the contrerseval director), its violence is more manga style with  its exaggerated blood spurts and colour. Even the violence could be considered as sexual, especially with the character of Koike, who is literally the walking, talking Freudian castration anxiety complex. 

With its anime aesthetic, repetitive sound track( which is a variation of classical music such as Ravel’s Bolero to Japanese punk, with the signature song being YuraYura Teikoku’s Kudo Deso) and its unique characterisation, Sono delivers a film that will first make you laugh, then cry and  leave you begging for more. The film’s duration is four hours long, which used to be six, however don’t let that deter you as you will be wishing it still was the original cut. During an CUEAFS interview with Third Window Films MD Adam Torel, who owes the distribution rights of the film , I asked him about he about film’s duration and the potential impact on its audience.

“Its one of them films that people are put off initially when you tell them, but when they see, they realise as critics in the UK have done, that it actually a very good film…I think with the help of it winning in Berlin and it gaining cult status at film festivals…Four hours is a long time to sit in a cinema although it is a fantastic cinema experience, but with the dvd sells you can take toilet breaks.”

 No longer live in sin and repent by doing 10 Hail Mary’s and four hours of one of the most amazing films to come out of any film industry

The Japanese Gender Issue

The celebration of the female director has become paramount to film festivals globally. This years, The Japan Foundation dedicated their annual touring film program to the rise of involvement for women in the film industry, entitled ‘Girls on Film: Females in Japanese Film industry’. Whilst there is no denying that the global film industry is still considerably male dominated, the rise of the female director has always been one of endurance and perseverance, constantly fighting off the stigma of labels such as feminist film-makers or the more begrudging and derogatory categorization of their work as merely ‘women’s films’.

Although the consideration and appreciation of the Japanese female director is becoming ever more widely recognized, this has not always been the case. There have been countless examples of female directors in Japan since the late 1930s, with Tazuko Sakane accredited as the first with her 1936 film Hatsu Sugata. However, a sense of acceptance for the female film maker in Japan would only truly begin in the 1980s.

Female directors are often critically compared to fellow women in film, such as Momoko Ando herself being considered as Japan’s answer to Sofia Coppola. In this case, the comparison was not made because of correlating methods or recurring themes but due to both directors having extremely influential fathers in the film industry (Ando is the daughter of actor and director Eiji Okuda). However it is problematic to compare Ando to a Hollywood female director, as this marginalizes any consideration of the Japanese socio-cultural context (the imperial gaze strikes again!) The pertinent question this raises is why can’t female directors be compared and considered in relation to other directors with shared thematic concerns, regardless of biology or gender?

One possible answer rests upon a seemingly positivist common consensus that female film makers offer an alternative depiction of the portrayal of the woman in cinema, especially compared to the traditional and classical Hollywood studio analysis of Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’, and the inherent negative connotations this has for the representation of women on film. For example, Momoko Ando used particular scenes in Kakera to advocate a naturalistic and realistic representation of the female, such as the scene of Haru getting ready to go out, rejecting a mode of presentation which fragments and sexualizes the female body. Ando purposely includes scenes that depict her protagonist Haru getting ready in the morning, sitting awkwardly on the toilet and more notably openly dealing with her menstrual cycle. This scene in particular represents an attempt at a more natural and realistic representation of the femininity, an overt challenge to the the male biased myths of the sexualized women so prevalent in Japanese cinema.

During the London premiere of Kakera I was lucky enough to interview Momoko Ando on the behalf of CUEAFS, in which I asked her about these particular scenes and their purpose. She replied, “I just wanted to say fuck off to all of this. Boys have some kind of stupid fantasy towards girls and we are actually human.” Ando also revealed that she cast Hikari Mitsushima (she can also be found in the excellent Love Exposure [2008], also on release from Third Window Films) in the timid, self conscious role of Haru because the actress has a huge male following in Japan. Ando wished to subvert not only the representation of women in her film but also challenge the consensus of the female as a sex object.

It seems that female directors have always attempted to deconstruct the female as an object for decades. Rather than Coppola, Ando is more accurately following the footsteps of her Japanese female predecessors such as Sachi Hamano, who has made over 300 films in her life time. One of her most well-known, mainstream releases Lily Festival (2001) features elderly women who learn to re-explore their own sexuality when a male newcomer joins there retirement home. The film depicts how love, passion and sex are not confined to the young, but can also belong to an older generation of women. Both Ando and Hamano explore female sexuality, but also purposely chose to portray their female characters in a light that breaks male constructed images of the female, resulting in a more realistic representation.

Ando states that Kakera is “ about identity, it doesn’t matter if its boy or girl. It’s the person you should concentrate on”. Her debut is not explicitly about gender; it is about individualism and being free to express yourself as physically, emotionally or sexually as you may wish.