Kôkeimu

Looks like I'm the 1st person to post a review for this wacky, stark, incomplete bizarre dream, and it's utterly compelling.

By chaotic alignment or deranged happenstance of the cosmos. After a rather fecund musing on film censorships. I literally just watched Varun Grover's short film "KISS" it today - and yes, you can check out my review on that one!). And perhaps a little NSBM was blasting too (weird, I know). I found myself inexplicably drawn back to Tetsuji Takechi's "Crimson Dream" (1964)", also known as "Dream of the Red Chamber." A film so utterly deranged and brazen, its butchered, disjointed copy - courtesy of the ever-so-judicious Eirin, Japan's classification board - only adds to its mystique. Based on Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's unsettling short stories? Naturally.

One simply must appreciate a Tetsuji Takechi introduction. While his infamous "Day Dream" (1964) gave us that iconic burst of white, thick paint, and the 1981 version, a Giallo-esque dental drill soundscape, unsettling and really a mental film. "Crimson Dream" opens with a minimalist, stage-play theatricality. It's a knowing wink, a subtle invitation to the madness.

In Crimson Dream, We're plunged into a world where women discuss nude shows with casual intrigue, for its time, a delightful subversion. We wander through scenes of characters utterly engrossed in these spectacles. There's also a play called "Witch in the Bath Tub". One wonders what depravities the censors cruelly snatched from us, leaving only a man devouring mere scoops of ice cream.

A painter's melancholy at his wife Ruriko working as a geisha dissolves into a sequence of her covered in glistening, goo-like paint. Then, a male sauna, a nightmare of him stomping on her slippery, eel-like body in a tub - the close-up, so visceral and cool for it's time. The bizarre never ceases. A return home, a disillusionment softened by Ruriko preparing his favorite konjac - leading to a fantasy of it rubbed all over his face and chest. From food fetish, we glide effortlessly into foot fetish, his plea for her to step on him, a bizarre vow of eternal love (lol). And then, paint fetish, he makes her roll in a floor of paint, creating a piece of living art - this sequence is really kickass, an abrupt, censor-mandated cut, naturally, but we see the post-coital concerns. I could think of experimental shorts of director Robert Huot. So anyway circling back, the painters nightmare persists: a return to the spa, a bathtub killing, the perplexed disbelief of onlookers, the draining tub, and a fleeting shot of her, strategically covered by her own long hair.

The tonal shift to color, to a stage play, is simply mesmerizing. Shots that are awe-striking in their aesthetic boldness - a man covered in white paint, his theatricality, a woman sneaking between his legs. And the final red chamber dream sequence looked damn cool. Its graphic visuals, especially the peeling eye, are unforgettable, asserting Takechi's unapologetic audacity. More conversation about food, inevitably referring to the human body, because of course.

The last few scenes after the family meal and show are funny, abrupt, and tantalizing. The female lead's hand tracing his chest, a brazen close-up of nipples, and then, the end card. Just like that.

Man, F THE CENSORS. It's a sobering thought, how many true cinematic transgressions have been butchered, missed, dismembered like this.