Guilty of love or Guilty of Romance

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 October

* Contains spoilers *

One sounds rather better than the other, more mysterious. (Less accurate?)

The starting voiceover sounded as though details being given about district with the greatest concentration of love-hotels were in spite of boredom ('romance-hotels' doesn't sound quite right - and 'love', anyway, is a poor euphemism), but maybe it was just meant to sound a matter-of-fact tone, perhaps as a bid (they did regularly crop up, not usually successfully) to wrong-foot the viewer.

Maybe, having left only 70 minutes in, I am not in a position to judge, but this film just seemed like a whodunnit, and a not particularly interesting one (except for students of mutilation), but one with (attempts at) embellishments. Attempted, because the Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata sort of neglected wife with a boorish husband (and / or otherwise unhappy marriage) was only one sort of springboard into this 'adventure' for Mitzuko, and it was neither followed up, nor very convincing (e.g. the absence of her pre-existing life, except when - exceptionally awkwardly - some friends are produced and invited around for tea).

The stupid husband seemed, from what I could judge from the subtitles, to be a celebrated writer, but actually, despite his airs, of Mills & Boon (perhaps where the romance comes in?), or maybe Alan Titchmarsh. (By contrast, Sleeping Beauty did not need an such excuse, and went straight in, not even via touting hot sausages in a supermarket, but with a proper waitressing job that was not enough to finance university and lifestyle.)
Then, along with that Australian film, we move off into the territory of Buñuel's Belle de Jour (frankly more challenging, after all these years (1967), than either), but only as a build-up for sexual liberation generally and, specifically, a cheap laugh about how doing a porno-shoot with a stud makes one better at offering hot sausages enthusiastically (those scenes, in themselves, were surely a surprise to no one, least of all Mitzuko).

And that leads us into the domain (no going back) of casual sex, dressing differently / seductively, and the love-hotels about which we were so carefully told before. After that, and an autopsy complete with maggots, a crime scene with violently coloured pink paint, and a sex-scene in a show with the odd paint capsule thrown in, does one care much about where it is going or, more importantly, how it is going there?

Well, I didn't, but I cared even less to hear what I am fairly sure was Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Bach's works for cello accompany all this, and that, apart from not being interested in how it unfolded, was my main impulse for leaving. (Perhaps the incongruity would have been less for those who were unfamiliar with this, even so, admittedly well-known music, perhaps not, but it turned the switch to 'off' for me.)

Or was this really an attack on the culural imperialism and globalism of the western world, disguised as a film? Certainly, there was little evidence of the restaurant and retail chains that dominate most cities. Certainly, we were being shown a culture particular to Japan in the love-hotel. Certainly, the western music of the baroque and the nineteenth century was being challenged to stand up against the most graphically demanding of bedfellows (and thereby proved that Bach is not, after all, strong enough to survive any treatment, even if that of Jacques Loussier were not enough to demonstrate otherwise), so maybe...

Still don't care!


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