ANTI-PORNO

アンチポルノ

Directed by Sion Sono

Masters / Japan / 2016 / Experimental, Pink Film / 76 mins / Japanese with English subtitles / HD / US Premiere

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ANTI-PORNO

UltraStar Mission Valley
Saturday, November 5, 2016 10:40 pm

ANTI-PORNO

UltraStar Mission Valley
Thursday, November 10, 2016 8:55 pm

Description

Official Selection, 2016 L’Etrange Festival
Official Selection, 2016 Festival du Nouveau Cinema

What happens when Japan’s oldest major movie studio asks a batch of venerable filmmakers to revive its high-brow soft-core Roman Porno series… and includes renegade wild card filmmaker Sion Sono? Wecome to ANTI-PORNO, Sono’s sexually careening, wildly Lynchian anti-response to pornography, a film in which the main character pukes rather than climaxes. Sono keeps Nikkatsu’s one rule of its legacy: a sex scene every 10 minutes. But with strap-on dildo in one hand and porn film’s obsolescence in the other, Sono is at his most flamboyant and layered, harnessing his delirious characters to undress power in the film industry and question the absurd contortions women must endure.

Like a Groundhog Day gone amok, ANTI-PORNO careens madly through the psychic undergarments of Kyoko, a famous artist and writer whose porcelain surface hides mania. Noriko, her whipstrapped assistant, abides Kyoko’s every command until the tables turn, and turn again. The two circle each other recklessly within a candy-colored world, while on the fringes, a squad of sycophants and dictatorial producers send Kyoko deeper into a vertiginous psycho-sexual labyrinth.

Ami Tomite’s Kyoko is a sensation, unbridled, frenetic, and unpredictable at every moment. In ANTI-PORNO, she is visual centerpiece, narrative victim, and irrepressible force. As Kyoko foils her handlers at every turn, she becomes the naked touchpoint through which Sono asks what it means to consume female nudity today, how auteurs in film production repress women, and how an unruly female psyche might defy domestication (and porn) in spite of it all. –Christina Ree