Shabondama Elegy

This is an intensely provocative experiment filled with avant-garde tone, wacky black humor, philosophical conversations, perverse behaviour, and plenty more bizarre sequences. It is artistically extreme which will evoke a love it or hate it feeling. It is set in Tokyo and portrays a bizarre real/reel life relationship of Jack, a convict on the run from the Yakuza and police. Under pressure, with only few days left to live, Jack moves in with Keiko, a porn star with a mysterious abusive past. They begin a relationship that pushes boundaries to extreme limits and conditions. There's no point in telling the plot further as it gets more bizarre and kinkier with a pinch of Christopher Doyle (Cinematographer of Wong Kar-Wai) like settings and camera work. Aryan Kaganof succeeds in creating a disorientating atmosphere and he maintains it from the opening credits featuring a cameo appearance by exploitation legend Hisayasu Satô's till the climax of the film. Like I said in the start, there is no middle ground and there is no room to fit this or call this "Okay" experience. Decent performance, mental direction, crazy soundtrack, and a plot that weaves into itself to get graphic and upsetting. This is not an easy watch, but I would recommend to those who have a strong stomach for twisted cinema and respect an acute vision, do not skip this piece of experiMENTAL piece of filmmaking.

I say "must see" for film students because this movie uses every trick in the book, yet it looks fresh and inventive.

I came upon this work solely from an interest in Thom Hoffman, whose performance in Black Book I admired. (One thing leading to another.) Hoffman is good in this as well, though the films couldn't be more different.

The other review here (and at the time I write this, there's only one) mentions having to see the movie multiple times to understand it. I would if I could. It's just that there is so much graphic sex. I'm not a prude. I'm gay. Believe it or not, some gay men have a hard time looking at straight sex, just as straight men are uncomfortable watching man on man sex.

And then again, I did not consider the plot--at least as much of it as I understood--as interesting or important as the way it was presented.

Primarily this is a story of an obsessive love affair. "Lust affair" might also describe what's going on. The lovers' intimacy is shown without reservation, and it is in many of those scenes--one with f**king and one with cunnilingus, for example--where camera work and post production effects are especially inventive. Those kinds of scenes are digitally enhanced, sometimes in the style of Linklater's Waking Life (which was made two years after this movie), sometimes reminiscent of Avedon's psychedelic Beatles' portraits.

Many times multiple images are overlaid. Sometimes scenes are shot from wildly different angles. Editing lingers or is rapid fire. Generally I'm wary when techniques like these are employed, but in this instance they are the essence of the film. This is a film that does not make compromises to facilitate comprehension. Information is provided poetically, albeit graphically. It is a graphic poem.

A couple other observations. The soundtrack consists primarily of gritty, minimalistic '50s style jazz, not exactly atonal but certainly edgy. I usually hate that kind of music but this I liked. I thought it served the story. And I was amused to note that even the seamy-side of Tokyo looked spotless.

If I were straight, I probably would watch Elegy a couple more times. But not to see the sex. It would be to have the total experience.

(An aside: I found the digital censoring typical of Japanese films distracting. The realism of the sex is utterly convincing--for all I know it may be actual sex. To have genitals obscured seems petty in light of how raw everything else is about the film. If there isn't an uncensored version, there should be.)

okay, i've seen this film only on video, so i don't know how/if it works on a big screen. anyway, shabondama elegy is something really unique, a crazy mixture of yakuza and romance filled with strange colours, cutting techniques and inventive camera angles; like Ian Kerkhof is as usual. the story is really hard to follow, it took me 5 times watching it and i'm still not sure if i understood everything. the film's beginning is quite normal though. tom hoffmann is arrested by the cops in tokyo (probably because of drugs) and by a chance he manages to escape. after picking up a girl (mai hoshino)in a nightclub in shinjuku, he stays at her place because the cops and the yakuza are both after him. at this point, the film gets really hard to watch, ian kerkhof does his best to deconstruct the storyline and alienates the images in any possible way. in the end, jack gets shot. sounds a bit spoiling now but it's not really because you see the showdown already in the first 10 minutes, so you know the end in advance even before you've seen the whole. sometimes you see keiko (mai hoshino)telling her story as if it was a flashback, the film ends with the opening sequence. it's like david lynch with a videocam dropping acid in tokyo, the film is free of any clichés and conventions, it should be considered like abstract video art. you just can't put it in any category, and i think this is what ian kerkhof intended. already because of this, the film gets 10 to 10, it is something i haven't seen before. and i've seen lots of betacam-trash films. o.k. the sound recording isn't the best and the dialogues are senseless, but there is still ian kerkhof's brillant camera work and a very well told, lyrical story. i liked it specially because of its ambition to create something new. i think it must be considered from this point of view. so i suggest to watch it for a second time and again and again, you'll always gonna find something new.