1. The painter, the pimp and the filmmaker:
Quite early in the documentary on the rebellious Japanese Film Director Sion Suno called ‘The Sion Suno’ directed Arata Oshima, the son of Nagisa Oshima, there is a sequence where Sion Suno as a painter violently applies colours onto a blank canvas. Initially, he takes a random colour to make a random line in a random area on the empty white canvas. Declaring that this line has been painted without any forethought, he wipes it crudely with his bare hands to further ruin it up. ‘She (the canvas) has lost her virginity to some jerk. Now she does not care about anything anymore’, he declares.
Quite early in the 2011 Sion Suno film ‘Guilty of Romance’ (Koi no Tsumi) a young man who looks like a lovable playboy called Kaoru played by actor Tryuju Kobayashi, woes and takes Izumi Kikuchi one of the film’s central characters enacted by Megumi Kagurazaka, to a cheap hourly rental hotel in the sex district of Tokyo. He initially has consensual sex with her as he splashes pink-coloured paint by bursting or squeezing small liquid balloons on her bare body. As Izumi blissfully basks under the aftermath of the encounter, all of a sudden, Kaoru kicks her buttocks to throw her off on the bed. He sits on her, pins her, ties her hands, calls the reception and asks for an extension of the room stay. The mild-mannered Izumi is terrified.
‘Now here comes another shallow guy’, Sion Suno continues in the ‘The Sion Suno’ documentary, as he takes another random colour to brush another random line on the already messed-up canvas. He arbitrarily wipes the second random line to accentuate the mess on the canvas. ‘I am worried about her (Canvas) future’, says he and after a thoughtful pause adds, ‘And then… Uncle Sion visits her… ‘. With an air of authority, he takes a sip from a beer can and spits it out violently on the canvas ‘and vomits’, he smiles. ‘It (canvas) is not white anymore’, uttering so he rapidly and crudely spreads out the beer fallen on the canvas upon the messy paint that it already has, with his hands. ‘She is not pure. She has lost her virginity’, he affirms.
In the scene at the rent-by-the-hour hotel room in ‘Guilty of Romance’, we realise that Kaoru is a pimp who is trying to test Izumi into prostitution. He is now seen, with brute force, penetrating into the terrified lady, banging her hard from behind. While doing so, he takes her phone, dials her husband’s number and demands her to tell him that she won’t be coming home tonight. Shaking violently and rhythmically at the extreme assault that she is shockingly undergoing, Izumi tires to maintain her composure while speaking to her husband to inform him accordingly. The pimp’s forceful humping initiates her to the world of prostitution.
‘She (the canvas) was raped by a Tsunami’, Sion continues in the documentary ‘The Sion Suno’ as he further brushes some more haphazard lines on to the canvas. He has now fully messed it up – so much that it now looks abstract and arbitrary. His hands are equally messy. He looks at it intently, ‘For me this is the beginning. She (the canvas) is now 18 years old’, he says. ‘I’ll show you a good thing’, he continues with some determination and rapidly paints a recognizable figure of a human face on top of the mess that the canvas now is. The face has a distinct cap that is very similar to the one that the pimp wears in ‘Guilty of Romance’ and to the one that Sion Sumo also usually wears.
2. The ‘Mise En Scene’ Arc:
‘Guilty of Romance’ appears to be about a bored well to do house-wife Izumi Kukuchi’s journey into liberation and physical degradation. Yes, you read it right – deliverance though body degradation. Agree that it is an oxymoron, but I would guess that is how it is in Sion Suno’s world. There is enough abjection in the film that could force one to decry such an abuse. But on the other hand the characters also find ‘real’ solace in the sexual assault and physical abuse injected on them! And on top of this, there is also this prickly feeling that Sion Suno might probably see himself as a liberator of his forlorn characters who need to break free from the shackles that they are drowned in – similar to the way he had liberated the canvas (she / her) in ‘The Sion Suno’ from the mess that some ‘jerks’ had created, upon which he drew the face-saving recognizable figure of his doppelganger.
The outward serene world of Izumi and her husband Yukio Kikuchi, played by actor Kanji Tsuda, is built brick by brick through well composed shots taken from a steady tripod, using sober colours and whose rhythms are paced gently in the narrative flow. The tone is by and large bright and high key, unlike elsewhere in the film. The camera movements are smooth, repetitive and as calm and composed as the characters themselves appear to be, through their subdued acting. Yukio is a timid self absorbed writer who maintains his clock work schedule – his time by and large spent outside the house. The first signs of uneasiness occurs when we realize that, unlike in his private life, his writings have a great amount of sexual libido to them.
Izuki herself appears to be an obedient Japanese house wife having no individuality of her own, almost a glorified dutiful maid. As age catches up with her she feels the need to find her own self. She first sells sausages in a shopping mall where the world of sober colours, well composed steady shots, cameras fixed to the ground and subdued acting continue. Things begin to change when Izumi gradually starts exploring her repressed sexuality and thus, her freedom. She gets an offer for a photo shoot, which she takes up albeit hesitantly. Brighter colors begin to appear, the camera gets mobile in its handheld avatar. The photo-shoot morphs itself into hardcore pornography; Izumi is tentative but plays along. It results in her having liberating sexual flings even beyond the camera – in public rest rooms and love hotels. The imagery in the ‘Mise En Scene’ has not yet turned to the ream of darkness and contrast.
It is while lounging with her new found freedom in the crowded streets of the fashionable Shibyuya area in Japan that Kaoru the pimp lures her with magic, charm and pink coloured water balloon canons, which he seem to generate by the plenty. Inside the rent-by-the-hour hotel that they visit for a seemingly bodily liberation of the libido kind, things get brutal for Izumi – rape, physical abuse and blackmail into prostitution. When they come out she is violently confused, but has passed the pimp’s test of endurance. It is dark – the imagery in the ‘Mise En Scene’ increases in contrast, the lighting low key and the camera continues to have the shaky quality of the handheld kind. That is when Izumi meets Mitsuko Ozawa, played by Makoto Togashi.
It would initially appear that Mitsuko’s character is pivotal in nature – her role confined to making things happen in Izumi’s life. True it is that, but it is also much more. Mitsuko’s character is based on a real-life 39-year-old senior economic researcher at the prestigious Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) called Yasuko Watanabe, who after sunset morphed herself into a cheap street hooker. She was brutally and sensationally murdered in 1997, resulting in a false arrest of a migrant from Nepal called Govinda Prasad Mainali. Govinda was staying the neighbourhood of the rundown abandoned place where Yasuko entertained her clients and where her body was found. Govinda was finally acquitted and deported back to Nepal, but in Japan the condition of women who lead such a dual life acquired a name for itself – the ‘Yasuko Syndrome’.
In ‘Guilty By Romance’ Sion Suno picks up the character, names her Mitsuko, makes her a brilliant lecturer by the day and a wilful street hooker by night. ‘If there is no love, charge money for sex, even if it is discounted’, is her motto for personal liberation. She takes Izumi under her belt, guiding her into the life of prostitution; theorising the degradation, abuse and pain that comes along. She seems to be a lady in control of herself and of the abuse meted to her! She urges Izumi to accept the violations of her body, as she herself has done in her own quest for liberation. She leads her into the handheld, low key, dark faintly lit violent and jerky world that is immersed with saturated bright colours that Sion Sumo creates in a rundown abandoned house where sadist customers and masochistic clients brutally entertain themselves, exchanging money.
Izumi’s journey is towards the world of Mitsuko, towards debasement, seen as empowerment (or visa verse, if you wish). ‘Love gets its meaning only if it has a body’, Mitsuko philosophises. When she wilfully lets people abuse her physicality the word ‘love’ gets a body to it and therein lies gratification for her. Mitsiko excitedly urges Izumi that the degradation should be such that she should ‘fall into the depths’. By the end of the film Izumi imbibes in herself Miksuko’s character – her words, thoughts, deeds, aggression, quirkiness, defiance and she even wear her dress, does business with her clients in her own operative areas. When Mitsuko and Izumi entertain a client together, we realise that is Izumi’s husband. He too has been living a dual life, his writing stemming out of kinky sexual acts that he indulges in with prostitutes. Izumi insists that he pays her for the loveless sex.
Izumi’s journey can also been seen in the journey that the ‘Mise En Scene’ follows. The well-lit slow paced, stable framed, sober colored, under played and apparently serene imagery in which Izumi inhabits, gradually morphs into a jerky handheld, dark, contrast filled world that is splashed with bright colours of pink and red, that which is violent and overtly enacted. As she gets brutally beaten up in the end of the film with blood dripping out from her mouth, we see Izumi give a contended smile in close up to the background score of the soothing kind. The depth that Mitsuko was urging Izumi to fall down for her to get empowered has been achieved; the transformation arc of the character and that of the ‘Mise en scene’, are also complete.
3. The morbid mutation:
For a film that has two strong female central characters in it, it is intriguing that it starts with a third female character – an investigative police officer Kazuko Yoshida played by Miki Mizuno. In the first sequence itself we see her making passionate sex with her lover, ironically in one of the pay-by-the-hour love hotels existing in the same area where Mitsuko and Izuki operate. Before the act can become fruitful, she gets a call about a gruesome murder that has just happened. She has to rush there. In an unused dilapidated house amidst the scattering of used condoms are two seemingly complete but disfigured bodies. Both have parts of a mannequin fixed onto them– one below the waist and the other above.
Conceptually this sort of disfiguration can be seen to have some platonic connections with the distorted figures and faces that Pablo Picasso had painted. The connection becomes more evident considering the fact that the journey of the film is itself the disfiguration of the mind and body of Izumi, Mitsuko and a whole lot of Japanese women seen in the movie. The facture or the way in which this disfiguration is achieved is also through the jumps in time that Sion Suno indulges in to jumble-up the chronology of events that are happening in the film. The resultant withholding of facts and its gradual unfolding puts us in doubt if the two bodies shown in the film initially are that of the two women seeking empowerment. Later as the investigation progresses and as the timeline of the events become clearer, we realize that there are not two disfigured bodies but one, that of Mitsuko. Everything of her body is there in the murder scene except the face and the genital parts.
Mitsuko has a personal history. It is hinted that she had posed nude for her father for his paintings. She was abused and had repeated sex with him. After his death she finds solace in her clients. She lives with her mother, who hates her to the core as she can’t stand her debauchery and that of her husband while he was alive. She wants to end her family tree, than live in irreparable shame. While I am not interested in disclosing as to who killed Mitsuko, it is the mother who has collected her severed face and genital parts tucked neatly into her bags. In short, she has enough reasons to kill her daughter and commit harakiri, which she does in the end by inserting a sharp knife into her throat. It would seem that Sion Suno spares Izumi of this extreme fate, but just about. She too could possibly end up so, in future.
Where does Officer Kazuko fit in here, apart from the functional part of investigating the case and unfurling it to the audience? The Hollywood version of ‘Guilty of Romance’ is shorter – the obvious scissors falling on the Kazuko track. The Japanese version dwells on Kazuko’s personal life – on her dilemma and the balance she tries to achieve between leading a normal caring family life and finding discrete sexual gratification with her husband’s friend. Her world too consists of relatively steady frames, subdued acting, sober colours – dimly lit greyish tones in her office that gets relatively warmer in her house, as it is ever raining outside.
She too has her idiosyncrasies, albeit not to the extent the others in the film have. She is magnetically pulled towards the dilapidated house where the gruesome murder has taken place. She might visit it under the guise of investigation., but once inside she opens the red mat upon which the other two have had violent sex with their respective clients. As she lays on it, she calls her boyfriend and indulges in some telephonic sexual conversations that results in her masturbation. She is also haunted by another young married woman (5th of the woman characters, if we count Mituko’s aged mother) who plagued by extreme guilt had killed herself in her arms. The dying lady had cheated on her husband and begs Kazuko to destroy her phone, as she does not want to leave any evidence of her adventurous adulterous life. Ironically, the officer whose job is to collect evidences, destroys one.
Kazuko hallucinates about the lady while she masturbates in the dilapidated house and while travelling in trains. It is the train sequence that helps the film to transcend itself from the immediate particularity of the events, into the realm of the general. As she reflects on matters, she looks around to see various other women who are travelling in the compartment. All of them are tired, worn-out, unhappy and seem too carry an unknown burden within themselves. Who knows what stories are they caught up in? Officer Kazuko seems to be at the one end of the spectrum in which things are simmering beneath the seemingly normal exterior. Mitsuko, her mother and the dead guilty lady are at the other end of it, which is a point of no return. Izuki travels from one end of this spectrum to the other. How long will it take for Officer Kazuko to make that journey into morbid mutation?
Telling is the last scene of the film where one morning Officer Kuzuko runs after a garbage collecting van so that she can dumps her two garbage bags into it. She misses the van at every street corner and at every collection point – till she gives up. She looks around and sees that she is in front of the dilapidated house where the murder has taken place and where she had masturbated. Quite earlier in the film, her assistant tells her about a real case of a missing lady who ran similarly behind a garbage truck with her bags, till she came to an entirely different town. She had then thrown her bag to reflect on the listless life that she has been living all the while. The film ends near the dilapidated house when Officer Kuzuko gets a call from her horny boyfriend asking her about her whereabouts.
While ‘Guilty of Romance’ in its full avatar might have achieved a cult status in European Film Festival’s mid night screenings circuit and amongst its drooling audience as an ‘extreme film’, the American exhibitors might have not gone beyond their limited view of things. True to their nature they might have seen this film as a horror-erotica-slasher genre film. For them Officer Kuzuko could just be a means to tell the sensational oriental story of two hookers addicted to love, sex and self degradation. Sion Sumo is on record to have liked and given approval for both versions.
4. Damned be the ‘Mise En Scene’:
In the documentary ‘The Sion Suno’, director Arata Oshima and his camera is shown another canvas by Sion Suno. As usual it has some faint little random lines and brush strokes on it. Also painted are the dates in which the canvas was worked upon. It has been two years in the making. Implying that it is the journey that become important than the work itself Sion Suno majestically declares in what can be perceived as a put up excitement, ‘Life is not about good or bad. Paint, expresses and live. That is how it is done’ . He then violently throws the canvas (She / her) to a corner throwing a condescending ‘Take this… you deserve it’ dialogue to it. The canvas (She / her) crashes on to the wall. Not satisfied, Sion straightens it up and bangs it hard, looks at the camera and almost thunders, ‘Understand?’
No, I did not. Whose responsibility would the impact of your self styled journey be – in which you paint, sing, write, film, live and express mindlessly? If that journey also eulogises abuse, as ‘Guilty of Romance’ is perceived to do; and if you think enlightenment and empowerment is possible through morbid self abuse – how valid can that be? Little is done to distance yourself from your characters and their worldview. In fact the ‘Mise En Scene’ particularly in ‘Guilty by Romance’ seem to be endorsing them. Of what use is the perfect ‘Mise en Scene’ arc, if what is being said itself is damning? Let all the apolitical French harbingers of the auteur theory and their present-day progenies be damned for salivating on the mere thought of an impeccable ‘Mise en scene’ of the personal kind. Their condition is similar to the mid night Film Festival audience who drool upon seeing bare bodies that light up the screen and have cinematic orgasm.
In April 2022, journalist Shukan Josei wrote an article in the Japanese magazine ‘Prime’ giving testimonies of two former Sion Suno actresses. Their identities were hidden and they had accused director Sion Suno of sexual assault – using his powers of a director as leverage. Sion Suno responded by filing a court case against the writer.
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