Mysterium Pictorum 22 - ANTIPORNO

Listen to our full discussion of this beautiful mess of a movie on our podcast series Mysterium Pictorum! Available on any podcasting app you like!

Endure the opening, it will be worth it.

This film is visually striking, theatrical in tone, thematically challenging, structurally innovative and quite moving towards the end.

There’s not a great deal of subtlety to be found here. The message is yelled right into the camera, as if it were a Zulawski picture. I usually hate such antics, but in this case, the message is actually worth being yelled into a camera, so that’s fine.

I love the fact that this is part of a kind of Japanese equivalent to the Tarantino/Rodriguez „Grindhouse“ project. Five directors were given the rules and budgets that 70’s era „Roman films“ had to be made with (low budget, one week to shoot, a „sex scene“ every ten minutes, nothing too explicit - Apart from that, total freedom) and Sono really excelled in turning the formula against itself. I’d love to see what the other four directors did.

In our podcast episode, obviously, we pitch what our takes would have been, had we been parts of this.