Starring: Megumi Kagurazaka, Makoto Togashi, Miki Mizuno, Kanji Tsuda
Director: Sion Sono
Category: III (Japanese)
After the four-hour Love Exposure from 2008, director Sion Sono's latest film is certainly his most ambitious. The Japanese filmmaker has delivered what appears to be an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House as a criminal thriller with huge dollops of explicit sex, violence and gore thrown in for good measure.
However, what starts as an audacious take on the issue of female emancipation, soon descends into farce, as Guilty of Romance spirals towards the incoherent, melodramatic mess of an over-the-top relationship drama.
Throughout the film, Franz Kafka's The Castle is frequently mentioned - and the first half certainly promises a lot about the pointlessness of human existence, as homemaker Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka) tries to find her self-worth beyond trying to be a model housewife for her morally pure novelist husband (Kanji Tsuda).
Sono allows Izumi to discover her own inner desires through the sex trade, as she finds liberation through first nude modelling and, finally, full-fledged prostitution and promiscuity under the aegis of Mitsuko (Makoto Togashi, above left with Kagurazaka), a streetwalker who works as a respectable literature professor.
Izumi's wanton indulgence in an amoral universe works well as a statement against patriarchical social norms - until the film's second half sees the more cerebral aspects of the premise come crashing down. As Izumi's (and Mitsuko's) so-called 'degeneration' is given a raison d'?tre - in the form of a hopelessness brought about by the men in their lives - Guilty of Romance returns to the well-trodden territory of women abandoning themselves to carnality out of desperation rather than a need to attain independence through control of their own bodies.