A hotline whose business model is to affirm that their callers are “absolutely right” finds itself in a quandary when a client thinks her mailman is in on the grocer’s conspiracy.
CONTENT WARNING: Contains strong language and violence.
All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)
SATURDAY SHORT: BABY THUMP (2021)
A couple is awakened by a strange crying noise, and debates what to do about it.
CAPSULE: A HOLE IN MY HEART (2004)
Ett hål i mitt hjärta
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DIRECTED BY: Lukas Moodysson
FEATURING: Björn Almroth, Thorsten Flinck, Goran Marjanovic, Sanna Bråding,
PLOT: A son watches as his father and a pair of actors shoot an increasingly violent and depraved amateur porn movie in their small apartment.
COMMENTS: Lukas Moodysson has had a strange career. He began as a poet and novelist before moving into cinema with his debut, Fucking Åmål [AKA Show Me Love], a realistic lesbian romance. After another crowd-pleasing drama, the commune-set Together, he went into darker (but still realistic) territory with Lilya 4-ever, a bleak drama about a Russian girl sold into sex slavery. After this well-received trio, Moodysson was a critical darling with a large home-grown fan base. Seemingly, he decided to blow it all up with the deliberately off-putting experiment A Hole in My Heart.
There’s not much story to Hole. A young man lives with his dad. He rarely leaves his room, partly because the father is using the rest of the apartment as a set to produce a series of amateur porn films with his two live-in actors (one male, one female). In between shoots, the three principals dance and party as the son hangs out alone in his room, tending his earthworms and listening to industrial music on his headphones. The porn scenarios begin as normal sex acts but escalate into pseudo-rapes, force-feeding, and vomit play (the latter somewhat reminiscent of the commune orgies from Sweet Movie.) At one point, the female actor angrily abandons the group, but soon returns to pick up where they left off, acting as if nothing had ever happened. Some character development occurs: the son and father discuss the boy’s dead mother, the actor and male director bond when the latter reveals he has a serious illness (a hole in his heart?) that causes him to occasionally pass out, and the actress flirts with the son, falling short of a seduction but nevertheless producing a bond. Everyone seems to be seeking love, but not finding it. The film ends inconclusively.
The material here is disconcerting enough—the three porn producers block out upcoming scenes using barbie dolls, who sometime lose limbs in the process—but Moodysson deploys infuriating formal tricks to discombobulate the audience. The soundtrack barfs up a lot of grating, staticky noises at random moments. Though the story is ultimately told mostly in chronological order, the editing is often non-linear, crosscutting quiet conversations with sex scenes. There’s a dream sequence featuring crop circles. Moodysson interrupts the flow with snippets of real surgery footage, of both the labiaplasty and the open-heart variety. The entire things is shot faux-documentary style, with indifferent framing, unflattering lighting, and with both product labels and faces of extras fogged out. (At one point, the main cast’s faces are digitally obscured, too, suggesting the characters’ shame and lack of consent to be filmed under these degrading circumstances).
The overall feel of Hole in the Heart is of one of those nihilistic experiments of Harmony Korine or Giuseppe Andrews. At its best, it approaches a Lars von Trier Dogma 95 provocation like The Idiots (1998). But Hole fails to generate empathy for the characters inhabiting its squalid setting, leaving little impact other than a dyspeptic stomach. The one thing that saves Moodysson’s experiment from total failure (and a Beware rating) is that the screed does have a particular target, the adult entertainment industry, and it does suggest, through pornographic poetry, how that commercial concern sucks in the vulnerable and distracts humanity from making healthy connections. That’s an intellectually thin message, however, and one that’s largely drowned out by the rivers of blood and vomit on screen.
Moodysson followed up this effort with the even weirder (but less disgusting) Container, an abstract avant-garde movie that nearly cost him all his remaining supporters. Her returned to realism with 2009’s Mammoth, then won fans and critics back with the heartwarming nostalgic coming-of-age story We Are the Best! in 2013. All seven of his features are collected in Arrow’s “The Lukas Moodysson Collection.”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: DING (2021)
A naked baby follows a man around a city, with mayhem on its mind.
CONTENT WARNING: Contains violence and strange animated scrotal nudity.
CAPSULE: A HAUNTED TURKISH BATHHOUSE (1975)
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Bakeneko Toruko furo
DIRECTED BY: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
FEATURING: Naomi Tani, Hideo Murota, Tomoko Mayama, Misa Ohara, Taiji Tonoyama
PLOT: A prostitute reincarnates as a vengeful ghost cat to seek revenge on her abusive pimp husband.
COMMENTS: A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse is the softcore/yakuza/melodrama/horror mashup obscurity you’ve been waiting for (if you’re the “you” in the above formulation, you’ll know it). This breathless nonsense hits its soapy plot points with ruthless economy as it rushes towards its demonic vengeance, with nothing to interrupt the flow except for gratuitous rape, torture, and sex scenes. The lavish sets and painted sunsets make it look as good as a mainstream film of the era, but make no mistake: this ain’t art, it’s overproof exploitation.
Japan’s 1957 ban on public prostitution supplies the initial plot hook, as brothel workers migrate from legal sex work to going undercover at a “Turkish bathhouse” serving as a front for prostitution. Only Yukino (Tani) refuses to make the switch, preferring to take this as an opportunity to retire and spend more time with her husband (and her black cat). Hubby (a scenery-chewing Murota) is no prize, however; he stages an elaborate ruse to fake a debt to the yakuza to convince Yukino to go back to work, then invites her virgin sister to live with the couple so he can rape her. He’s also somehow hiding the fact that he’s second in command at the brothel Yukino’s been working at for years, while simultaneously starting up an affair with the bathhouse madame and owner’s wife. After Yukino gets pregnant and refuses an abortion, he and the madame make sure she’s taken care of (in a very sick torture scene), walling up the corpse a la Poe. In the second act, Yukino’s disgraced sister shows up and goes undercover at the bathhouse looking for revenge, but when she proves the most popular courtesan, the other girls get jealous and decide to beat her, until Yukino’s cat flies (literally!) into the brawl to scratch up hooker faces. As you can see, there’s a lot of plot going on here, but nevertheless the script finds time about every ten minutes to squeeze in a scene of bathhouse girls lathered up with soap, rubbing their naked bodies over clients who mug for the camera with expressions of comical ecstasy. And so it goes until the third act, when the vengeful cat spirit finally arrives in all its Kabuki kitty glory, turning the final twenty minutes into an intense stalking scene (interrupted by only a single bubble bath sex romp). Having sliced up the evildoers with cat claws or burned them to a crisp, an angelic Yukino recedes into the painted sky. Roll credits.
Production values—the bright cinematography, imaginative camera angles, relatively extensive sets and costumes, and a screechy, psyched-out rock soundtrack—are vastly superior to what you would find in a Western sleaze movie. In the Japanese studio system, there was less of a budgetary distinction between, say, a historical drama and a raunchy “pink film.” With one studio (here Toiei) making both prestige and exploitation movies, productions shared casts, directors, crews, and sets; a stalwart like Taiji Tonoyama could act in an S&M-tinged pink movie like this in-between roles in Nagisa Ôshima films. This gives a quickie like Bathhouse an unusual aura of professionalism, for a movie that’s basically a wacky, hastily plotted romp designed to put butts in seats and boners in pants.
Mondo Macabro puts out another fine-looking, expensive-feeling disc. The main bonus here is a passionate commentary from film writer Samm Deighan, who provides a great deal of context and information about the Japanese industry, the players, and the history of the various subgenres colliding here (while also, I would say, overselling the movie as a serious artistic effort.) A couple of featurettes from Japanese cult movie historian Patrick Macias, one on horror at Toei Studios in general and one specifically devoted to A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse, further supplement Deighan’s extensive background information. About fifteen minutes of trailers, for Bathhouse and other sexy/violent Mondo Macabro titles, round out a presentation that makes for a satisfying night at the movies for those willing to overlook the violent misogyny inherent in the pink genre.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
