Cold Fish (Sion Sono, 2010)

[The following is being considered for 2011 evaluations.]

Sion Sono openly states the narrative conflict of his thriller Cold Fish during the first on-screen murder, the revealed serial killer delineating his worldview from that of the man he's forced to witness this crime even as the victim continues to sputter and vomit from poisoning. As the killer says, the protagonist, Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), sees the Earth in its idealized, far-away form, a perfect glass sphere of swirling blue and white. But the murderer sees the planet up close, noticing only its craggy, ugly rocks. But then, Cold Fish is not exactly a war between idealistic romanticism and pragmatic viciousness, as the dreamer gets slapped into his place almost instantly.

Instead, Shamoto finds himself at the center of an intended class satire that uses the guise of a "based on a true story" crime thriller about a Japanese serial killer to set up social archetypes for grisly deconstruction. Shamoto, a mild-mannered, middle-aged fish shop owner, is the submissive employee who supplicates to his boss, the spineless reality beneath the idealized view of the loyal, obedient Japanese worker. He's but the first type that Sono relentlessly mocks, but where his epic but intimate Love Exposure rebuilt the world after shattering it, Cold Fish revels too joyously in its devastation, ultimately flying off the rails entirely until it's anyone's guess what Sono is trying to say.

Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

The warped Catholicism of Sion Sono's four-hour epic Love Exposure is fitting, given how the director clearly seeks to kill aesthetic gods. Known in some circles for referring to Japanese legend and humanist director extraordinaire Yasujiro Ozu as, quote, "the anti-Christ," Sono clearly wants to provoke and carve out his own name. On the basis of this film alone, he has succeeded. This film chews up everything — manga, pink films, J-horror, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, the Japanese New Wave — and spits out an unholy mess so sloppy and overstretched that it can't help but work without a hitch. My unfamiliarity with modern Japanese cinema precludes me from making any sweeping statement about its greatness compared to its peers, but I must admit I haven't seen as aesthetically revolutionary and explosive a film since another Japanese work, Yoshishige Yoshida's Eros + Massacre.

Like Yoshida's stupefying masterpiece, Sono's film tells its story with an off-kilter aesthetic: de-centered compositions cant and distort the image, faces rarely fitting entirely into the frame. Sex is also central to the narrative, but in the opposite manner that it proved crucial to Yoshida's late-60s work. Eros + Massacre was informed by the sex-positive revolution against repression that played a bigger part in youth movements across the world than we are typically taught to day. Love Exposure, on the other hand, is the product of a porn-saturated, pink film-inured society where even the cartoons are doing it. If the bifurcated timeline of Yoshida's film hinged (and ultimately came apart) on the freedom to explore one's sexuality, Sono's shows a young man trying to find sense and sanity through chastity, at least until he can find his own Virgin Mary to make his wife. That he essentially wants to have sex with the Blessed Mother, who also contains symbolic memories of his own deceased mom, instantly plunges this tale of Catholic guilt beyond the realm of Scorsese and into Buñuel territory.