TIFF ’13: R100

Even though filming has not even begun on the questionable movie adaptation of Shades of Grey, Hitoshii Matsumoto has already mashed-up the S&M melodrama genre beyond human recognition.  From Japan, we have a cautionary, surreal meta-meta postmodern bondage conspiracy tale, while Hollywood is banking on a dude who wears grey ties.  How quaint.  In the mean time, Matsumoto subverts perversion throughout R100 (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.

Takafumi Katayama is a drab and depressed working drone who needs to unwind a little.  He thinks he has found just the ticket when he joins a mysterious club for submissive men.  At first, he gets the release he is seeking when the black-clad women meet him at their scheduled rendezvouses to beat him about and smash his sushi rolls (that’s not a euphemism).  However, when they start showing up at his home and work, matters turn a distinctly charcoal shade of grey.

As each dominatrix escalates their encounters, Katayama starts to fear for his life and the safety of his young son and father-in-law.  Then things get really weird, but not do bother complaining about logical inconsistencies.  The film will provide that commentary itself.

Strictly speaking, there is no nudity or sex in R100, but it is absolutely, positively not for kids.  The title is a play on the Japanese motion picture rating system that could be roughly translated as NC-100 for American audiences—and not for nothing.  However, the film definitely seems to suggest you are begging for trouble if you go out looking for something on the deviant side of life.

Yet, R100 careens so defiantly over the top, it becomes a dicey business parsing its symbolic layers and potential take-away teachings.  If any of this film sounds problematic to you, then you should probably avoid R100 because there is way more of whatever it is than we’ve covered so far.  On the other hand, cult cinema connoisseurs looking for a new and distinctive head trip will find it here.  Imagine Eyes Wide Shut transported to the world of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber and you will start to get the idea.

Nao Omori perfectly anchors the film as the existentially put-upon Katayama.  Just looking at him sort of makes you want to smack him alongside the head.  However, he handles the character’s strange evolution with understated power.  As his son Arashi, Haruki Nishimoto distinguishes himself an unusually engaging young actor.  Fortunately, his classmates will not be able to see R100 for a while and hopefully he will not have to take much taunting over it in later years.

R100 pushes the envelope, but it never skitters into irredeemably disturbing territory.  Indeed, at some point the game-playing ends and the macro insanity takes over.  Although decidedly one-sided, there is also some decent fight choreography in the first act.  Recommended for exclusively adventurous viewers (but rather forcefully for them), R100 screens again today (9/13) and tomorrow (9/14) as part of this year’s TIFF.

Japan Cuts ’12 & NYAFF ’12: Scabbard Samurai

What do you get when you combine the labors of Hercules with Make Me Laugh in feudal Japan?  A disgraced samurai with a lot of deep bruising.  Yet, his dignity will take the hardest hit in Hitoshi Matsumoto’s physically demanding Jidaigeki dramedy Scabbard Samurai (trailer here), which screens this weekend as a co-presentation of the 2012 Japan Cuts and New York Asian film festivals.

Kanjuro Nomi is not even a ronin.  He is a deserter, who symbolically emptied his scabbard after his wife’s death from the plague.  He aimlessly roams the countryside with his young daughter Tae, who makes no secret of the higher expectations she had for her father.  Thanks largely to his thick head, they elude three distinctive looking bounty-hunters: O’Ryu the Shamisen Player, Pakyun the Pistol Boy, and Gori Gori the Chiropractikiller.  However, his luck runs out when the Tako Clan captures him.

Rather than a quick execution, Kanjuro will have to face the “thirty day feat.”  Like a Gong Show Scheherazade, Kanjuro has thirty days to make the lord’s emotionally catatonic son smile, or its hara-kiri time.  At first Tae is disgusted by the sight of her father performing belly dances and shoving foreign objects up his nose.  However, when his well-meaning guards start coaching him, she also gets with the program.  As his stunts become more elaborate Sisyphean exercises, the entire town rallies behind Kanjuro, but Matsumoto is not going for the easy Hollywood ending here.

Scabbard’s period details are passable enough, but they are hardly the point.  Frankly, it is hard to think of another film that mixes such liberal helpings of slapstick humor, maudlin sentiment, and high tragedy.  Yet, somehow it all blends together easily in Scabbard.  The impressively straight-faced Takaaki Nomi is quite the good sport, putting up with all sorts of Fear Factor humiliation, while managing to maintain Kanjuro’s dignified bearing.  As Tae, Sea Kumada is truly something else giving the old man what-for, but she is also shockingly good in her big dramatic scenes.  One-named actress-model Ryō also brings an icy charm to the proceedings as the lethal shamisen player.

Kanjuro is no Sanjuro, that’s for sure.  Yet there is something deeply heroic about him.  It is that unlikely integrity that gives the film such a unique spirit.  Sensitively helmed by Matsumoto, Scabbard Samurai is definitely not for the jaded, but that is what makes it such a nice surprise at the overlapping festivals.  Recommended without reservation for those who appreciate earnest father-daughter stories, as well as the odd pratfall, Scabbard Samurai screens this Saturday (7/14) as a joint-selection of the 2012 Japan Cuts and New York Asian film festivals.