Sion Sono has recently made a film with Nick Cage and been accused of abusive behaviour on the set of his many films. He is a prolific Japanese auteur who I had never heard of. I discovered the above information after watching Guilty of Romance, a Grand Guignol mix of sex, crime and hysteria. The film knits together three women’s stories, one of whom is a police investigator who is investigating a grotesque crime which might involve one of the other two women. They are Izumi, a straight-laced wife of a famous writer who starts to go off the rails when she is chosen for a soft porn photo shoot. The other is Mitsuko, a literature professor by day and prostitute by night. The three tales become more and more outlandish The timeline feels constantly on the brink of being out of synch and storylines are thrown around willy nilly. What starts as a compelling if lurid police thriller becomes an increasingly self-indulgent fable which tries to shoehorn in mutiple Kafka references and rambles towards its end. From this one film, one can see the attraction of Sono, whose overblown narrative, heightened lighting and over-the-top set pieces seem like a Japanese version of the alt-Korean cinema, but with Guilty of Romance it felt as though he could have done with an editor who was as ruthless as the cruel matriarch who is revealed to be the kingpin of Sono’s criminal empire.
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