Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Director: Sion Sono

It can't be much fun being an enfant terrible, if your work is childish and terrible. Sion Sono strays close with this latest piece of neo-nineteenth century symbolist cinema with lots of brutality, child abuse, mutilation and obsessed sexuality. After a quick quote from Huysmans, the film is launched with a parody of the opening sequence from 'Cabaret', but there was something weak about the mise-en-scene that left this viewer unconvinced.

The first half of the body of the film mixes dream and dramatisation to follow a path of child abuse, as a Japanese schoolmaster makes his daughter's life a misery and drags her mother into the charade of explicit sexual exhibitionism. It is proposed that the girl commits suicide, before the second half of the film attempts to contextualise the first, implying that this may all have been the work of a woman novelist, who specialises in sensationalism.

Masumi Miyazacki is both mother, novelist and sometimes daughter, the strongest presence throughout the movie, who is joined by Issei Ishida as a young literary assistant for the second half of the piece. They play well off each other, but it is not enough to rescue the film as a whole, especially as the ending veers off into a completely unconvincing resolution with the young man revealed as the child we have watched earlier.

So what is wrong here? Two many devices and tricks undermine the general impact of a film that is overlong for the material it is handling, less a tour de force, than a procession of narrative detours. Inadequate lighting, uneasy set design and decoration fail to create an atmosphere to intrigue the audience, indeed they undermine the credibility of the counterplay between imagined realities. Perhaps the most basic flaw is literary. What is the point of suggestion, if it is immediately followed by depiction? Pruning an hour of the material might have led to an art movie of interest, but what we see is what we have and it doesn't work.

If Sono aspires to art, then there must be more attention to the art of cinema. If this was just a jokey exploitation film, a chronicle of self indulgence at the expense of actors and crew, then they shouldn't have bothered foisting it on an international audience. Presumably it will go to DVD outside Japan, but its difficult to imagine 'Strange Circus' winning any kind of place on European, or North American screens and tv.