A Snake of June - Rinkos Geheimnis

If TETSUO was about hating your body, SNAKE OF JUNE is about embracing it. Fans of the former will know what to expect in terms of style: black-and-white, wild photography, bizarre imagery etc. What they won't expect is the relatively accessible and easy-to-follow storyline in the first half, as a woman discovers her own desires through the promptings of a blackmailer. About half-way through the focus is switched to her husband, and here we revert to total obscurity, in the TETSUO and TETSUO 2 mould. Tsukamoto buffs will find it all very interesting, others will be left baffled.

Another absolute stormer from the man who melted my brain with the excellence of Tetsuo as a teenager to such an extent that I had to pull it out and iron it and put it back in again. Then I went and saw Hiruko The Goblin. Ow....then Shinya popped up acting in Ichi The Killer a couple of years ago and I was reminded once more what a sick, deep and utterly vital gentleman he is. This is his take on the erotic thriller, and is fairly restrained by his standards and all the better for it. OK he does strangle a man with a metal penis at one stage, but one would feel let down without at least a touch of the old body horror. Actually this film has plenty of that, but it's more acutely concerned with a (sadly) more everyday disease that the fetishishic, grim techno porn of his earlier work. interesting performances, utterly compulsive storyline and busy, atmospheric camera-work would recommend this film to anyone fond of the director, and to a wider audience too one hopes.

I don't feel quite qualified to comment on this (not that this has stopped me before) as its my first Shinya Tsukamoto movie to see - but I can see immediately why so many people are fascinated by his movies. This doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense, and like so many movies of the 'I'm far too talented to be literal' genre of film-making, there are parts that just leave you scratching your head (or my head, as the case may be). But what is undeniable is that this movie is packed with riveting sequences and shows immense talent. This is one of those rare moves that demands a second viewing to delve beneath the layers. It starts out as a slightly creepy thriller and then goes on a variety of tangents, some of which seem logical, most do not. It seems to be about the need not to suppress our deeper needs (a pretty common theme in Japanese film making), but its 'subject' is much less important than the style - and what style there is here. The blue tinted B&W photography is stunning, with fantastic editing and very dedicated acting. Well worth catching, but not when your granny is around.....

When I learned the A Snake of June was made by the director of Tetsuo, I almost turned it off. I'm glad I didn't because Snake is a lot more interesting and somewhat more comprehensible - but that is only relative. The story starts off reasonably straightforwardly, following phone-counsellor Rinko at work and at home with her unresponsive husband Shigehiko. For the first half it is an exciting erotic thriller, complete with blackmailer.

The introduction of cancer - a transformation of the flesh echoing the techno transformations of Tetsuo - leads into new territory. The focus shifts from Rinko to Shigehiko after one of the most erotic scenes in mainstream cinema. And then it lost me. There are some sado-masochistic similarities to Cronenberg's 'Crash' with its three-way interactions. The scenes between husband and blackmailer are increasingly surrealistic. They may be dreams or fantasies: if not some scenes are comically preposterous. But however incomprehensible the film becomes it is made so well that attention never flags. The urban setting in rainy season Japan is filmed in a blue-tinged monochrome, and the constant rain is used with great effect as a significant 'player' in the film. In hindsight, well worth watching, even though I suspect that the sub-titles do not do justice to the film's complexities.

This reminds me of my discovery with Tetsuo, ten years ago, of a cinema out there. Tetsuo for me at the time was like listening for the first time to bands like Throbbing Gristle or SPK. The term 'industrial' wasn't just a commercial label, it communicated something fundamental of the fabric it was made of, not of style but of the sound itself (in Tetsuo's case, the image). It was enough to simply experience it, interpretations seemed superfluous.

Snake of June is a similar experience for the body, in the sense that the ideas explored pale in comparison to the exploration itself. Whatever it's a portrait of, of sexual or personal liberation from the self, it's the portrait that matters to me.

The grimy aesthetic pulsing with grain and noise, the fluid camera exploring dark recesses of an urban dystopia of constant downpour, the sudden bursts of fetishized sex, all these orient and provide contrast and context to what is explored. It's not enough to see these personal demons overcomed by the female protagonist, the boundaries of mundane existence broken apart, it counts to experience how they reflect.

A view of the mind is permitted here through a camera obscura, dancing on the walls of the mind we see demented projections. The emerging view is not clear, but like the best of surreal cinema, kaleidoskopic. We may piece something together of the image we see, but that's hardly the point for me. I point a kaleidoskope to something to experience the phantasmagoria of the fracture, Snake of June works likewise. The portrait we get is not a lifelike depiction, but an expressionist one.

This may be linked to horror cinema due to Tsukamoto's credentials, but it's really New Wave in the best tradition of directors like Susumu Hani and Toshio Matsumoto.