With the release of Tokyo Tribe, the team at easternKicks pick their favourite Sion Sono films…

Suicide Club, 2002

My introduction to the works of Sono Sion came through Suicide Circle/Suicide Club, which I’d read a few bits of information here and there about online, giving tantalising glimpses of what sounded like a masterpiece of madness. Still reeling from the ultraviolent wonders of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale a couple of years back, I did my best to track the film down, eventually managing to order a copy of some description. Even though I’d heard about the now infamous opening sequence, in which 54 schoolgirls cheerfully throw themselves in front of a speeding Tokyo train, nothing could really have prepared me for what still for me stands as one of the most bold and shocking sequences of the last fifteen years.

If anything, the film only accelerates from there on in, Sono packing in the atrocities and insanity, building towards a climax which is as startling as it is baffling. Gore aside (and there’s plenty), where the film really disturbs and delights is through its poetic nihilism, gleefully keeping the viewer reeling as it pirouettes between murder, mutilation, rolls of skin and pre-teen J-pop. The film is an assault on not only the senses but the mind, verging at times on bizarrely philosophical art cinema while working in gruesomely beautiful imagery – though far from being the director’s first film, it’s the one with which he first truly made his mark, revolving around many of the themes and motifs he would return to time and time again in his later works.

James Mudge

Suicide Club at its surface is a crime drama. People of various social strata and ages are willingly killing themselves in astounding numbers. Throughout the movie we follow a group of detectives charged with finding the cause to end the horrid fad . If the film were this simple, it would not be my favourite Sono film. Its opening scene is nothing short of biblical, with 52 schoolgirls, hand-in-hand leaping from the platform and being pummelled into gore by the 7 o’clock shinjuku subway train. This is something not wholly foreign to the Tokyo commuter population, who experience 2000 transit delays a year due to “jinshin jiko” or “human accidents”. From here we are taken into even more disarray as a gym bag is found with 200 slices of skin sewn together into what looks like the world’s least appetizing sweet roll. The detectives serve as the most tragically ironic aspect of the film, as they investigate crime after crime where the murderer is the victim.

Sono understands that Japanese society can better be portrayed in metaphorical vignettes; excitable youths exclaiming “I wanna kill myself…let’s all kill ourselves” during their rooftop lunch break, a flamboyant gang leader/musician named Genesis in his “pleasure room”, a bowling alley where he serenades his victims as his leashed gimp sways beside him, and possibly the most gruesome suicide montage in the whole film set to a eerily playful children’s song. Everything is a play on Japanese compensatory society, where efficiency and order seem to be a thin veil over maniacal creativity. Overarchingly he is trying to insert something far more metaphysical, a message that is nothing short of perplexing. A child, or several children, call the police station throughout the film uttering a series of phrases: “I know you are connected to people around you… how would severing those connections feel?” and “are you connected to yourself… how would severing that connection feel?”. As cryptic as these utterances sound, they evoke a bizarre quandary. An acquaintance’s suicide is devastating to you, but a separation from the self is not something that allows grief. Sono perfectly captures the wholly unique case in which one is “severing the connection with oneself”, suicide being as Camus put it, the “one serious problem in philosophy”, a phenomenon foreign to the mind incapable of committing the act, an abyss that this film brilliantly and uniquely shines a light into.

Yonah Sichrovsky

Love Exposure, 2008

You never forget your first Sion Sono and this, a random pick up at a film festival back in 2010, has remained my favourite ever since. The story focuses on Yu – the initially docile son of a priest who sins to gain attention from his father and whose cross dressing antics as Miss Scorpion bring him in contact with Yôko a troubled, man-hating teen who falls in love with this alter ego. Manipulating this relationship out of her own infatuations is Koike a member of a cult called ‘Zero church’ and a victim of Yu’s upskirt photography. Taking on the lead role of Yu was a bold and gutsy move for singer Takahiro Nishijima, a move he was advised against by his company as potentially damaging to his image and that of his group ‘AAA’. He does an admirable job in Sono’s film – capable of the wide range of emotions needed to portray Yu as well as the slender physique and soft features enabling his appearance as Miss Scorpion to be convincing rather than pantomime. Hikari Mitsushima has the right balance between sweetness and attitude, her role winning her an awards at five festivals as best newcomer or best supporting actress. Sakura Ando has her first role as the understandably psychotic Koike whose abusive past has shaped her present, a daunting role that won the award for best supporting actress at the 31st Yokohama Film Festival (2010).

Four hours (cut down from six) might seem a little lengthy, but considering the complex relationships Sono portrays, it feels exactly right. Religion, family, death, love, mental health and of course sex are held together with the strong central love story between Yo and Yôko. Clocking up 8 awards and prizes for Sono including two at Berlin it is peppered with references to classic Japanese cinema and veers between humour and horror with ease. From scenes that are emotional deep to those that can shock an audience as much as delight them Sono’s 27th project contains the grande manga guignol bloodbaths and anti-establishment code of previous works. He pushes boundaries and demonstrates the complexity of modern belief systems so artfully that you come away wanting to write about every layer you have seen on the screen. Delightfully hyperactive in gathering the threads of the story together its hard to say too much without spoiling its effect for those who haven’t yet been initiated. At its release it was easily one of the most accessible of Sono’s film and is still one I always bring out first in my recommendations.

Kay Hoddy

Strange Circus, 2005

My first experience with Sion Sono was the gigantic Love Exposure, a day I’ll probably never forget, then the others came in, one by one I had eaten most of what he had directed, but one of these was hard to digest: Strange Circus opening sequence hits hard. I had to stop and give it a second chance when I felt ready to watch almost two hours of paedophilia, abuse and really really gory violence. As a result I was awarded with one of my favourite Sono’s films – it’s hard to choose a single movie -, his ironic, excessive and kitsch aesthetic slowly demolished the horrific patina around the whole cryptic story about a young girl, Mitsuko, growing into a psychotic famous writer dealing with her confused past. Obviously things are not as they seem, they never are in the film industry, a series of surprises that combined with the crescendo of weirdness ties the spectator in a race where an explanation is the much craved prize for having watched such horror and drama.

Sion Sono’s Strange Circus is no different from much more respected feature films like Cold Fish or Suicide Club, it uses the hardest way to show the director’s idea of humanity, a whole bunch of small playful things crashing violently against each other. It helped me to set a new standard in horror movies, how could gore be combined with an intelligent reflection of our society: confused, little, dirty, worse than what we think the animal world is. Strange Circus is definitely worth the pain.

Fausto Vernazzani

Less of a traditional Sion Sono film, and sharing more thematically with Takashi Miike, Why Don’t You Play In Hell is probably one of Sono’s most polarising pieces to date. The film itself is incredibly meta, feeling similar to inception in the way it constantly peels back layers and forces the audience to not only reevaluate what they know of the plot, but also how they are watching the film and the information portrayed on the screen. Packed to the brim with homages, the graphic B-Movie-esque violence is not to be missed, as it causes less tears and more joy from both the overacting and ever-escalating narrative,that throws anything from torrents of blood to raging Yakuza fight scenes into the mix.

Told primarily from the story of a group of young filmmakers, the ‘Fuck Bombers’, we see the story through their lens as they work for a local Yakuza clan to shoot and stage a mobster film for the bosses wife’s release from prison. Each scene is thought-out and the overlying context is not a critique of style or taste, but one of filmmaking itself and a social commentary upon both the current state of the film industry and that of the audience itself. Overall, Why Don’t You Play in Hell is one of Sono’s more memorable works, purely for it’s scope in filmmaking and narrative, exploring both the audience and the feature in new ways, whilst always managing to retain its overt hilariousness.

Andrew Daley

Tokyo Tribe, 2014

Tokyo Tribe is the answer to the question you didn’t know you had: what would a Sion Sono-directed remake of West Side Story (1961) be like? Set among the trashy, glaring lights of Tokyo, this insane hip-hop opera is wonderfully serious and campy at the same time, absolutely victorious over the only other effort I have seen in the genre, the terrible Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001), starring Beyoncè. In addition to the storyline (all Tokyo rap crews must unite to fight off the Yakuza), it is somewhat of an ethnographic work, featuring actual Tokyo MCs, DJs, producers, and tattoo artists whilst portraying the diverse hip hop scene in the capital. Perhaps it is the community behind the film that makes it so unique an experience, despite its over-the-top costumes, gangsta rap stereotypes, corny characters, and misogyny so rampant that it makes you actually wonder “wait, is this maybe a critique of how ridiculous misogyny is?”.

It’s great fun to be on the lookout for specific Sion Sono style marks, and here he delivers one of the most impressive shots in his career, the 5-minute long, continues take that opens the film and introduces us to all of the tribes, set to a pulsating beat. In the end, it’s one of Sion Sono’s gentlest and most optimistic films, capturing the hopeful spirit of a generation that discovers both self-expression and collective identity through the making of art. While Tokyo Tribe is hardly the best film you will ever see, it is a strong addition to that “cultish, awesome, embarrassing” list we all like to keep.

Bogna Konior

Tokyo Tribe is released in selected UK cinemas from Friday 22nd May, with a UK DVD and Blu-ray release from 15 June 2015.