Beginning my week-long Hisayasu Sato birthday film festival on August 15th, a decision I both regret and strangely appreciate, and found myself sifting through a lot of his less-than-stellar work. Among them, I found myself revisiting The Fetish Aka Hot Breath, a film that, in the context of his other work, it seems to have all the pieces but fails to assemble them into anything coherent and built around a series of loose threads.
The film shoves a bunch of typical Sato characters into a single building - Kazuya, a germaphobic young man who lives with his sister and her husband. He is perpetually unsettled by the violent bondage rituals of his sister's nightly activities. This unease spirals into him becoming a serial killer, slashing random people on the streets to vent his frustration. This, in itself, is a flimsy premise, but the film further convolutes it with a handful of other characters: an audiophile neighbor who records all the ambient sounds, a gay painter who becomes obsessed with Kazuya, and an ending that feels completely out of place and random.
It's more like a collection of Sato's usual preoccupations stitched together without a clear purpose. It attempts to link Kazuya's trauma to the voyeuristic habits of others, but these connections are tenuous at best. We're given glimpses into the characters' inner lives, but never enough to understand their motivations, leaving them as hollow shells.
The whole thing feels like a lazy photocopy of a better Sato film. It has the same grimy aesthetic and the same fascination with broken people, but it's got no soul. It's a film that promises all the usual depravity and delivers none of the punch. It's a waste of time, a chore to get through, and a fine example of why not every idea needs to be made into a movie.
Fetish stands out as one of the most pointless entries lol why to look for plot in a porn film. Skip it and only for the Sato die-hards.
