Sion Sono Movies

I don't want this to be long. And I didn't bother looking up Sono's personal info, for anything other than his movies could only bias the impression. Artists aren't expected to be as good or interesting as their works anyway. Here I simply jot down what I think after June's watching spree.

Some distinctive features of Sono's movies:

• Strong signature: As in the cases of Miike, Tarantino, and Park, you will recognize a Sono movie. Anatomically accurate gore, charmingly hot babes, these are easy clues, but there's more to Sono's signature. Liberation from one's past mold of living, and discovering a way to become "connected to oneself" (a quote from Suicide Club), shedding all that are irrelevant to this connection, is a central piece shared by many of his stories. Live a life that you can actually feel. That is the choice, and wild sacrifices, the main characters all made. And obviously, Sono does not concern himself with moral teachings, which is acceptable in arts. For viewers who do care, they must learn that the misdeeds rather symbolize benign struggles in life.

• Feminism: Sono doesn't simply portray women as equally capable or powerful, but more to the essence, equally human, in both good and bad ways. Sono puts much effort in the complexity of his female (and male) characters, particularly their inner conflicts and self-contradictions. He is clearly not interested in creating saints and heroes. On the contrary, his passion is in dramatic and often violent and/or sexual incarnations of perversion. Many themes can be dark, but Sono loves painting them with a brush of comedy. Nevertheless, that doesn't make the stories less heavy, but does often make rational thinking easier as our emotions haven't overwhelmed us. In contrast to many genre movies (Japanese and beyond), Sono's female characters are not mere plot utilities, or commodities needed to hold typical places in a story. They take charge, relentlessly. Now this is not saying Sono is simply replacing male characters with female counterparts. After all, women do have distinctive qualities from men, due to both nature and nurture. What Sono shows is that women are as emotionally sophisticated, as flawed and weak as men, their lives as rich and diverse as men's, and their struggle as heartbreaking. Sono isn't necessarily trying to be politically progressive (again, I don't know anything about him), but in a way, Sono is just smart, because artistically exploring women's mind gives artists a gold mine. (Side note: the Love Exposure hotshot, Hikari Mitsushima, was cast in the superfluous role of the younger sister, two years earlier for the popular Death Note, her movie debut. Sono saw that she was capable of much more.)

• Realism: After a few of his movies, you will quickly stop hoping for superheroic actions in those showdown moments, and accept that we're dealing with actual humans here (cf. Takashi Miike, who is more of a romantic). But because of this, when something utterly incredible and unexpected happens, the emotional impact is profound (ref. the self-revelation in the final scene of The Forest of Love). For illustrative purposes, we take a negative example. The first Iron Man movie was touchingly heroic, because he felt so real; but after Iron Man got into the Avengers franchise (might as well be called Iron Man in Wonderland), I was like, whatever.

• Classical music: Sono loves placing classical music in intense scenes. He's a smart guy, so undeniably, as a tactic this is convenient and economical, but it still seems to me sincere, touching, and particularly refreshing in this genre. But because I have a certain way of imagining what is carried in the sound of the classical masterpieces, admittedly I had a few moments of getting distracted by such exotic juxtapositions. I think Beethoven Symphony No. 7 played in Love Exposure was one of Sono's good uses of the masterpieces, but just in no way as immersive and powerful as in Tarsem Singh's The Fall, which a long time ago moved me to tears, and was the first time I ever learned to appreciate Beethoven (as an artist, rather than a legend). But with Sono, you get to practice keeping an open mind. After all, classical masterpieces do not impose constraints on their interpretations, and are indeed of infinite versatility. That is, Sono can abuse away and the results still end up better than what most composers of today can ever achieve.

• Writer: Sono seems to enjoy hiring certain recurring male actors (similar to how Tarantino loves bringing Samuel L. Jackson back in his movies). That I guess only those who write what they direct have the confidence to do, for they know that their stories are good and fresh. Yes, such actors are all very capable and popular, and they and the director are probably tight. But I still tend to see this as a show-off, as explained in Zahavi's handicap hypothesis, that I, the director, can have the same cast play in all my movies and every one of them will still be a distinctive success, because it's my story that supports each success, not a fresh hot cast. (Well, a single Nick Cage in debt clearly can't save all the subpar stories.) A similar show-off of Sono is the reuse of main character names across different movies, such as "Mitsuko" and "Murata". Of course, there can be several alternative motives. I just like to think he's naughty. Side note: Chan-wook Park, in comparison, although often taking writing roles in his movies, was not as big on creating his own original stories.

Unlike Tarantino, Sono seems not particularly afraid of producing subpar works. I encountered two such unfortunate movies:

• Himizu (2011)
• Tokyo Tribe (2014)

I said unfortunate, because both stories had great potential, with solid art as well. Given Sono's track record, he should have made them work. Himizu appeared to have all the right ingredients, but when put together, it just failed to produce the emotional power that a good Sono film was able to. The empathy inducer somehow went missing. In Himizu, the boy's path to patricide, the girl's love, and his path from rejection of the love to the final embracement... such intense inner struggles, yet all felt like a puppet show. It would be poignant to ask the characters therein, Are you connected to yourself?

Art is true magic (which "magic" is not). When it doesn't work, it's not easy to pinpoint exactly where things went wrong.

And come on, what's up with Tokyo Tribe, can't Sono make it as good as Why Don't You Play in Hell? Talk about bad rap. Heck, even the gore technicality went embarrassingly crude (cf. Cold Fish, The Forest of Love). But nitpicking aside, many more important things went wrong in this one. I was like, did Sono give up? Is it a film by Sono's Brain Fart?

Now, not only is this disappointment subjective, but also relative. Sono just had made explosively charming pieces, that in comparison, the inferior ones readily stood out.

PS. Here's a twist: Neither Himizu nor Tokyo Tribe turned out to be Sono's original stories, but rather manga adaptations. Why Don't You Play in Hell, in contrast, was Sono's own baby. Now this is very interesting. Hypothesis: in the talent dimension of adaptations, Sono is shit. Any counterexamples? (Maybe TODO.)

The watch list:

1. Cold Fish (2010) 6/14
2. Tag (2015) 6/15
3. Antiporno (2016) 6/16
4. Love Exposure (2008) 6/16
5. Why Don't You Play in Hell (2013) 6/17
6. Guilty of Romance (2011) 6/18
7. Suicide Club (2001) 6/19
8. The Forest of Love (2019) 6/22
9. Himizu (2011) 6/23
10. Noriko's Dinner Table (2005) 6/26
11. Tokyo Tribe (2014) 6/27

Also some Non-Sono Japanese movies:

1. Let's Make The Teacher Have A Miscarriage Club (2011) 6/18
2. Cure (1997) 6/21
3. Vanished Girl in the Woods (2011) 6/28
4. Memories of Matsuko (2006) 6/28

This is already too long, so I can't elaborate more (won't). Just a few bits:

Lets: The teacher declared that she's foremost a woman and a mother, so she would kill if anyone dared to harm her child; In the end, as a teacher, she used her dead baby as a teaching prop to give her lecture, with kindness, to the psychopath student. Nothing embodies more intensely the spirit of a true teacher. Teaching good students is always the easy part.

Cure: Reminded me of Lesson of the Evil (2012) by Miike. Both villains were powered by their religious zeal to carry on a legend of evil. Maybe they even believed in reincarnation. Talk about deadly memes.

Vanished: Obviously low-budget, but a refreshingly solid indie piece / film-school work, with textbook good storytelling of a rather common thriller plot.

Memories: Like what many fans confessed, this is tear city. Brief words won't do it justice, but how Matsuko placed loving who she loved above rightness, indeed above anything, made her both vulnerable and invincible, and super-normally human. Audrey Hepburn: "It always boils down to the same thing - not only receiving love, but desperately needing to give it."