I Would Like to See It: Antiporno

There’s so much going on in Sion Sono’s Antiporno, which plunges headlong into subject matter ranging from masculine self-congratulation over their own art about women to the inability of parents and children to understand one another as sexual beings. It’s an intelligent film, self-assured in its structure and pacing — neither of which hold the viewer’s hand — and thematically dense, but as much as it’s about grief, humiliation, trauma, and pornography, it’s also about canary yellow paint and a deep blue satin bedspread, about pollen drifting through a haze of white-gold light diffused from passing through the branches of the canopy above. It’s about the way two different mouths form the phrase, “Bark like a dog” and the leering presence of men grouped together like monks in a Sadler painting in the gloom at the edge of a set. It’s a sensual experience crafted with meticulous care and left for the viewer to examine.

The complex and ever-shifting psychosexual dynamic between young, baby-faced Kyōko (Ami Tomite) and the older, more self-assured Noriko (Mariko Tsutsui) is the backbone of Sono’s film, and the chemistry between the two is at times overwhelming. Tomite’s big, protuberant eyes and small mouth seem at first perversely innocent, later genuinely vulnerable, while Tsutsui’s long, slightly gaunt face transforms from hangdog to aristocratic at the drop of a hat. The pure pleasure of watching both women alternately excel and falter in roles meant to be understood as overwritten and poorly directed can’t be overstated; it’s a smorgasbord, watching these women flex different dramatic muscles. Tomite’s affect during a scene in which she is assaulted by a young man she asks to take her virginity is at once desperately, ineffectually angry and hilariously wheedling, like she’s trying to haggle with a greedy vendor as she talks him down from rape to grinding on each other, negotiating not so much a change in his mind as a change in her own perception of what’s happening. A survivable reframing of an immutable event.

Antiporno is hot, too. When Tsutsui licks Tomite’s foot and leg as part of a ritualized ordeal of sexual humiliation the camera drifts in closer and closer as the soundtrack — a gentle piano rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon, of all things — fades into a haze of tinkling sound, tugging at the heartstrings while we glimpse the glistening surface of Tsutsui’s tongue. There is desire there, real and simulated and somewhere in between, an unselfish devotional quality both women find in different ways. The camera draws closer, but is it Sono’s camera or the camera of the film-within-a-film’s demanding, abusive director? Is it voyeuristic or intimate? Is there really a difference? Sensual experience is as much a departure from the body as it is a taking in of sensation, an inquisitive process at once indulgent and vulnerable, delicate and greedy. In a closing sequence the film shoots Tomite from above against a blank surface onto which pour waterfalls of paint, at first sexually suggestive, then smeared into a grey-brown sludge from which Kyōko’s parents rise mid-coitus. The cascade of sensation drips inevitably back into life’s traumas and tedium, circling the drain of consciousness.