Antiporno

Kioko, a young and glamourous fashion icon, sits around her extravagant artists’ pad while waiting to be interviewed by a high-flying fashion magazine. Feeling bored, downcast and generally irritable, she decides to take out her frustration on her older, submissive assistant. But all is not what it seems in this garish apartment: Antiporno is a film where both roles and situations take quick changes of turn. What unfolds might qualify as a demented meta-sexploitation film, with more plot twists than sex scenes.

Sono’s film is part of a recent “reboot” of the famous Nikkatsu studio’s “roman porno” series, and functions therefore as a direct commentary and deconstruction of a specific genre within Japanese cinema. Low-budget erotic films – the so-called pink films of the mid 60s and 70s – were a large and lucrative part of the Japanese film industry until the arrival of home video in the eighties. Many productions served as stepping stones for young directors, who were provided with ample room for experimentation as long as the films included frequent sex scenes.

Antiporno is not, as its title aptly suggests, a porn movie, despite displaying, within a mere 75 minutes of film, large portions of sex, nudity and submission, with additions of blood and vomit (!). Constantly subverting genre conventions, Sono delivers a highly baroque, entertaining and bizarre flourish of a film, kicking out against patriarchy and rigid Japanese societal and sexual mores. Chloé Faulkner

Sion Sono (b. 1961) was born in Toyokawa, Japan and attended the Hosei University. He has been dubbed “the most subversive filmmaker working in Japanese cinema today” and “one of the most idiosyncratic artists of his generation” by The Hollywood Reporter. His films include the violent horror drama Suicide Club (2001) and the comedy Love Exposure (2008), which won the FIPRESCI Prize in Berlin.