ian-milliss

This is a subtle and beautiful film.The fact that almost no Japanese women have tattoos is the beginning point of the film in which a woman's tattoo is symbolic of the way in which she is prepared to degrade herself for the lover who insists she gets tattooed. Yet the exact process of the tattooing, of which he is unaware, with its strange sadomasochist eroticism, gives her the power to throw her degradation back in his face.

The hypnotic sounds of this part of the film as the needle punctures flesh, the slow trickles of blood, the warm darkness amid the snowy landscapes, the cloying atmosphere of conspiratorial guilt, erotic degradation and also pride and beauty and defiance and expiation of past mistakes - this film is very subtle, very loaded and in some ways almost feminist in its exploration of what men do to women, all written out on the flesh.

And the many unknown connections between all the characters, symbolised by the book of snow crystals, the way in which each of them shapes the lives of the others without knowing the connections that shape their own, lives as evanescent and blown on the wind as the snow crystals.

I think this is a great film which should be recognised as such. Unfortunately many people who see the film are threatened by its eroticism, particularly its aestheticisation and sexualisation of pain. But that is in many ways the symbolic point of the film, the pain of life and love written on the body.

This must be one the greatest, least recognised trash films of all time. It has such a strange mixture of truth and pretentious phoniness that it is in a class of its own.

What Hollywood film of the time (or now even) would dare show anything as pornographic (for Fat Amerika) as Holly Near's binge eating scene at her birthday party?

Yet the incredible tackiness of it all perfectly illustrates the tackiness of late 60s rock culture, even if it gets all the details wrong, oh so wrong.

I love it, it's one of my top ten all time favourite films.