by SARAH ROWLAND

The jury is in: Japanese cinema is officially bananas. For regular Fantasia goers, the verdict is about as Earth-shattering as declaring “Godzilla destroys buildings” or “the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain.” But those who have not yet had their minds shattered by the J-horror shockers of Takashi Miike, the bittersweet surrealism of Katsuhito Ishii, the pop madness of Gen Sekiguchi or the acid-drenched anime genius of Tatsuo Sato at festivals past are in luck this week. Fantasia will give audiences yet another reason to spend their sunny summer days sitting in a dark room wondering what the hell could possibly happen next. Once again, the only thing you can count on at Fantasia, it seems, is the unexpected.

Take The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, in which young director Mitsuru Meike takes the softcore Japanese porn or “pinku eiga” genre on a hysterically dizzying existential metaphysical tangent. After being shot in the head during a yakuza skirmish, call girl Sachiko (played by Emi Kuroda) awakens suddenly endowed with a voracious appetite for knowledge, philosophy and, of course, sex. What she also discovers is that during the skirmish she has accidentally ended up with the yakuza’s precious cargo: the severed cloned finger of George Bush, which North Korea needs to launch a nuclear attack. Now she’s on the run trying to solve metaphysical riddles: Can binary structure explain the universe? Was Kant right when he speculated that God existed on moral grounds? Or, more importantly, did I just get finger-blasted by George Bush’s severed digit? If that sounds completely off the chain, it gets crazier. Suffice it to say it may be the best existential socio-political critique/porn movie you’ll see this year.

And where else but Fantasia could you catch a film like Executive Koala, where a seven-foot-tall marsupial in a business suit gives a corporate presentation about merging his pickle company with a kimchi concern, and then gets accused of murdering his ex-wife and girlfriend while his human co-workers look on like it’s no big whup? Sure it’s absurd, disturbing, and at turns hilariously low-budget, but maybe that’s the point.

The realm of the senses

As Toro Matsuura, director of Synesthesia, explains via (translated) e-mail, “for many Japanese directors, including myself, I believe that the improvement of the technique and keeping originality are very important.” Matsuura’s film—which plays this Monday—revolves around a man with synesthesia (a rare sensorial disorder in which the stimulation of one sense raises the response of another) on the trail of a serial killer who he believes is also a synesthete.

Backed by a solid cast (including cucumber-cool upstart Ryuhei Matsuda as the serial killer) and guided by a keen and patient eye, Matsuura manages to weave the suspense into a dream-like crime drama whose wistful pace belies its twisted subject matter. “Even under the flames of war,” explains Matsuura, “or even when you are running to the site where your beloved one is found dead, or even you yourself are dying, I believe that this rhythm of ‘silence and motion’ always lies in such situations. Therefore, even under the calm rhythm of everyday life, for instance, the mind might take the fast beat, or even under the imminent situation, the mind might take the calm beat.”

Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine and Shinichiro Miki’s Funky Forest also plays on this duality of pace and the everyday. A wild romp that jumps from one increasingly strange vignette to another, Funky Forest moves erratically, seemingly without logic, rhyme or reason, but with a tastefulness that somehow combines animated sequences, non-sequiturs, unrequited love, modern dance numbers, disembodied orifices, slimy blood-sucking mutant man-faced creatures that only respond to shaming and the oddest Cronenberg-esque after-school band practice you’ve ever seen into a hilarious and zany meditation on finding the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.

The erotic and the grotesque

This Thursday, director Sion Sono will be on hand to present the Canadian premiere of Strange Circus, a film that promises to pull Asian horror out of the painfully redundant Ringu copycat feedback loop it was stuck in for the last few years. Reviving the eroguro filmic sub-genre from the late ’60s—characterized by the juxtaposition of the erotic and grotesque—Sono’s film starts off twisted (bondage, exhibitionism, incest) and just gets increasingly disturbing from there (body modification, wheelchair sex and chainsaw amputation). So deeply layered are the twists and turns in Sono’s carnivalesque shockfest that you almost wish something was as it seems.

No Fantasia program would be complete without an entry by cinematic sensationalist Takashi Miike, who will no doubt surprise many fans with this year’s entry: the epic remake of the ’60s children’s television series The Great Yokai War, which, for those not familiar with the ultraviolent and highly sexualized work of Miike, is basically like hearing that David Lynch, Wes Craven and Max Hardcore collaborated on a remake of The NeverEnding Story. Thankfully Miike spares the kiddies any necrophilia, copious bodily fluid-squirting and fishhook torture date scenes and instead delivers what feels like a live-action Hayao Miyazaki film, complete with imaginative creatures and environmentally responsible moralizing, but peppered with just enough darkly twisted Miike sensibility (cute fuzzy animals bleed too!) to give it an Hieronymus-Bosch-meets-HR-Pufnstuf feel.

Communication breakdown

While it’s certain that surrealism and shock is the plat du jour for the current crop of Japanese directors, it’s not just shock for shock’s sake. Just as in Japan’s post-WWII cinema era, when the radioactive devastation of Nagasaki gave birth to Godzilla and the daikaiju genre, the method behind today’s Japanese directors’ madness is rooted in their need to confront the current issues facing Japanese society. For Synesthesia helmer Matsuura, the underlying problem is Japan’s increasing isolationism in the face of a growing technological society and, perhaps more importantly, its effect on the perception of reality. “We’re now confronting the problem of discommunication,” he says. “We have sacrificed the small communications for today’s convenient life. We no longer write a letter, and we send a cell-phone text message instead of talking directly. The developments of technology such as the PC and video games have increased the number of children who are not able to differentiate the real and the virtual. Misunderstanding and delusion occurring through such processes might lead us in a dangerous direction. Thus I sometime have anxiety watching today’s young people. One of the messages in the film is that the pain will surely return to those who do not understand the pain of others.”

All films show at Concordia’s Hall and de Sève cinemas. For schedule and ticket info see www.fantasiafest.com

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