Guilty of Romance (Koi No Tsumi) (戀之罪)

It's the first time I saw any film by Japanese auteur Sono Sion (園子溫). The film is shocker in very sense of the word. Guilty of Romance (Koi No Tsumi) (戀之罪) is billed as a sex crime thriller. But I think it's much more than that.

The provocative film, written and directed by the cult-film maker Sono Sion ("Cold Fish" ) opens with someone reporting finding two separate parts of a decomposed female body in a rundown building awaiting demolition in Tokyo's "love hotels" district. When the upper torso of one of those smooth plastic female doll-faced mannequins is removed, we find a badly decomposed body with maggots crawling all over it whilst in a separate part of the building, another part of a human body is found, except the upper and lower portion between the human and the mannequin's are reversed. The forensic pathologist tells the female police inspector Kazuko Yoshida (水野美紀) that the dismembered body parts belongs to the same person and that she died about 10 days ago but that some other parts of the body are still missing. She checks through the photos on the missing persons" list and zeroes in on Izumi ( Megumi Kagurazaka) (神樂坂惠), wife of famous erotic novel writer  (Kandji Tsuda) and suspected to be a part time hooker. Through careful screening and interviews, she suspects that the body belongs to one Mitsuko (Makato Togashi) (冨樫真), an assistant professor of literature at an Elite University whose father, who died about 10 years ago, is also a famous professor of literature at the same university.

As the film develops, we see how Izumi, a typical submissive Japanese housewife who lives a doll-like but also maid-like existence in a beautiful model modern home much admired by her friends, has to obey a strict routine every day. She must place the slippers at the exact same spot immediately behind the main entrance and (later also beside her husband's bed) and the right kind of soap at the bathroom, when her husband's, whom she adores, returns home at exactly the same time every evening, takes a bath and then reads on a sofa some four feet away from her. She must not approach him unless given express permission to do so. He never eats at home. She has been told  and completely believes that that her husband needs "complete concentration" to write and therefore cannot stay at home during the day and thus leaves home at exactly the same time every morning after giving her a tiny peck on her cheek but otherwise hardly ever touches her.

After a while, the 30-ish Isumi feels bored at having nothing to do during the day and applies for a job as a supermarket "food tasting" stall attendant after getting her husband's approval. Then one day, she attracted the attention of a woman porn magazine and film producer who persuaded her to give it a try. At first she naively thought her work would be restricted to posing for photos,and hesitantly agreed but as her first day proceeded, she was asked to wear less and less until she was completely naked and eventually, was made the female partner in a porn movie. To her surprise, she found a strange new delight and an inexplicable sense of "liberation" in what she was doing. After the movie making, the male actor invited her to continue their love-making at the "love hotel" district. There she was accosted by a tall gentleman in a rain coat who, like a magician,  would produce plastic squish balls from his pocket which would spill some pinkish paint all over one' face and dress when smashed. He turned out to be the pimp for another hooker, Mitsuko, the owner of the dismembered corpse. She wanted to follow in her footsteps because she was fascinated by the authoritative manner in which Mitsuko spoke but was advised not to. Mitsuko told her that though she was a hooker, she was also a literature professor at Elite University and that if she liked, Izumi could visit her there. She told Isumi that dilapidated house where she provided her services was her "Castle", the mystery of which she wished to penetrate. She related how about 10 years ago, her father introduced her to Kafka's novel "The Castle" the symbolism of which she has since adopted as that of her own in her private search for life's meaning and which has become a personal obsession. Izumi was intrigued and attracted by her very unconventional point of view.  Driven by an urge she did not fully understand, she followed her as she went about "entertaining" her clients as she watched and was later made a "prostitute" for the mate of her sexual partner. To her surprise, she did not find it repulsive. Mitsuko told her that she must insist on asking for money for making love with someone she does not love. Eventually she went to listen to one of Mitsuko's lecture and was very impressed. She recites a poem which says something  to the effect that she should never have learned words because there's another world without words ( presumably a world where desire begins). There, words will fail and people can only stop in tears. Convinced of the glory of finding her own sexuality, Izumi pleads with Mitsuko to initiates her into her exciting life and was introduced to work for the Mitsuko's pimp group, "the Enchantresses" and also to Mitsuko's mother, who seemed to know all about her daughter's secret life as a nighttime hooker and who also appeared to be quite familiar with Mitsuko's "pimp", the tall man in a raincoat with swish balls. We learn eventually that in fact it was Mitsuko's mother who cut her daughter into pieces after she died. She did not want any of her "dirty" parts in her house after her daughter died!  In the meantime, Izumi carefully documents her subtle change of attitude in her personal diary.

Towards the close of the film, we find to our surprise that Isumi's husband, who seemed the model of civility, decency and formality at home, was a regular customer of Mitsuko and wanted to be "strangled" during love-making so that he may be inspired to write about the intensity of sexual pleasure but when he protested to the manager of the Enchantress Club upon the arrival of  Mitsuko on that last call and asked for another, he was promised to a new girl but before she arrives, Mitsuko made love to him like a frenzied woman. One came, wearing a wig. After she made love to him like another crazy woman, she removed her wig. It turned out that it was his wife! When the film ends, we see Isumi peeing on the ground at a quayside, being watched by two much amused young kids to the tune of an extract from  Mahler's Symphony No. 5 , separated from them by certain dark metal bars, in a patische of the way the hero was separated from the object of youthful beauty in Visconti's "Death In Venice". by stretches of shimmering sea water in the receding tide on the golden sand in the sunset. I like the way Sion makes use of baroque music in this film to create a certain aesthetic "distance" from the "violence" of his theme, to balance the sublime with the depraved as we track the rapid sexual initiation and progress of Izumi from repression to addiction in an accelerating down/upward spiral. 

To me, the film portrays very well the strict division of Japan into two kinds of societies and culture. On the outside, everything is civilized, ideal, rational, public, with every aspect of life meticulously planned and executed with clock-like precision but beneath this smooth running surface, there rage the currents of the much darker forces of  more primitive biological instincts, its unsatiated but natural animal like desires for sex, violence, aggression for which only the night, the seamy run down hotels in cheap and lurid artificial lights seem to provide the right kind of habitat, but with absolutely no connection between the two. It is as if Japanese psyche is split into two water-tight halves, more or less like a Freudian schizophrenic split between the Superego and the Id. In fact, Mitsuko felt an Electra-like  complex to have sex with his father, whom she adored and with whom she identifies but was forbidden from doing so by her mother, who also knew of the wild strain shared by her husband and her daughter. As her mother came from a distinguished family, she quietly "tolerated" everything for the sake of not tarnishing her family name.  In the mean time, she bides her time patiently, coldly and calculatingly, for the moment when her daughter kills herself because she understands thoroughly that Mitusko feels the pain of unsatisfied desire to be so great and so intensely that eventually, sooner or later she would literally beg to be killed. With the assistance of Isumi and her pimp manager, Mitsuko did just that.That was the mystery behind the word "Castle" written in blood on the wall of the room where Kazuko found Mitsuko's body.

I like the way Sion images Mitsuko through appropriate cosmetic work as a witch or devil like figure, with skinny and skeleton-like body, heavy dark eye-lines, dark and red mascara with yellowish edges and dark lipstick to become a concrete symbol of her steel-like determination to push to the limits her beast-like desire.  There may be some truth in the promoter's claim that it portrays a spine-chilling "inferno" of desire! I like the contrast between order and chaos, the monotony of the idealized family relationship between man and wife and the repression of human desires which such an arrangement enforces, and the inherent unnaturalness of such an arrangement and the initially liberating effect of sex in the dark, seamy side of Tokyo and the explosive effects of its complete and uninhibited expression. There are no easy solutions. None is offered. Only a hint in the closing images.