STRANGE CIRCUS

 It is time to review another Sion Sono film, and this time I have chosen his 2005 film “Strange Circus”, a film that is extreme to the fullest filled with sex, madness, incest, revenge and of course a circus.  It is also a bloody good film too.

Let me start by mentioning that “Strange Circus” deals with a lot of disturbing things so those who are easily offended should probably stop reading now.  The film is about a young girl named Mitsuko who suffers horribly at the hand of her father, who is also the principal of the school she attends.  Sadly Mitsuko is regularly raped and molested by her father, but along with that, he disturbingly locks the young girl in a cello case which has a special hole in it so she is forced to watch her father and mother, Sayuri, have sex.  So regular is the abuse that Mitsuko has to start to believe that she is her mother and that she is enjoying the rape, just to endure the pain she is really going through.  One day in a moment that should have saved the young girl, Sayuri walks in on her husband and daughter.  In an instant her mind snaps at the horror she has just witnessed, but instead of helping Mitsuko, she becomes upset and jealous of her daughter and from this day on she too starts abusing the girl, but in a physical manner, constantly beating on her when she is upset with her.  During one of these fights, this time over a lost earring, Mitsuko accidently pushes her mother which causes her to fall down some stairs.  She hits her head and ends up dying from the blow.  Traumatized by the guilt, Mitsuko believes that it is her duty to take her mother’s place in the world and continues to accept the abuse of her father.  However once her grades start dramatically falling at school, it is like it is finally too much for her and Mitsuko decides to jump from the roof of the school in an attempt to take her own life.  However such is her luck, that she survives the fall but ends up paralyzed from the hips down.  What has this girl done to deserve such a life?

It is actually this point in the film that it takes a drastic shift as we find out that what we are watching is actually the work of a famous writer named Taeko, and this is her latest story.  She is met by her publishers as they see how she is going with her new manuscript as her deadline is coming up within a couple of weeks.  She is nearly finished, but the company decides to give Taeko an assistant, Yuji, to make sure she delivers by the due date.  After noticing that Taeko is in a wheelchair herself, and looking into her story in more depth, Yuji begins to wonder if what she is writing is autobiographical.  Is Taeko actually Mitsuko all grown up?  Yuji decides to find out once and for all but is he prepared for the answer he is going to get? 

Of all of the films that I have watched so far from director Sion Sono, “Strange Circus” is the most successful in achieving what it originally sets out to do.  It is a film that all at once disturbs us, makes us think, and even entertains us.  The circus of the title is literally the circus of the mind, as right at the start of the film, the ringleader looks directly at the camera and invites us on stage, thus giving us a look inside the mind of this sad and abused little girl (or is it?).  The film is basically separated into thirds, and the first third where we are witness to the atrocities put upon this young girl is thankfully treated very seriously and does not wink at the audience at all.  As such this part of the film is probably the strongest portion of the film.  It is incredibly disturbing as it is about a young girl being sexually abused by her father and about how this abuse infects her mind, so it is never going to be an easy watch.  Depending on how this material was handled there was a chance that the subject matter could be used for exploitative purposes but thankfully Sono respects his characters (and actors) and handles the material very realistically.  Speaking of the actors, Sono is able to get around putting his young child actor into any disturbing situations by the using the plot device where Mitsuko sees herself as her mother during the abuse.  As such whenever these scenes are taking place, Masumi Miyazaki (who plays Sayuri, the mother) fills the role of Mitsuko.  Visually this segment of the film is quite amazing as when we are in the mind of the girl, a lot of the images we are witness to are very surreal and more like representations of what has happened rather than exactly what is happening.  The colour red is used extensively (maybe a little predictably) with the blood painted walls of the school being a standout.

When we realize that what we have just witnessed is actually just a story that a famous author, Taeko, is writing, we are then thrown into the real world and visually the film becomes a little subdued.  Again Masumi Miyazaki plays the role of Taeko, which helps in the confusion of identities within the film, and in this section Sono let’s her go a little bit closer to the edge of madness as it is obvious right from the get-go that something is amiss with the novelist.  It is here that I should commend Miyazaki for her performance(s) in the film because within the three roles she plays she is able to create three amazing and quite different characters.  Throughout the film she is taken to a number of dark places that must have been hard to perform, but she does so admirably giving them a weight and seriousness to them.  She also has a lot of fun with the role of Taeko who, like I just mentioned, may not be all there.  It is within this section that the insane qualities that we have come to know from a Sion Sono film begin to rear their heads.  

Another performance that I have to mention is that of Issei Ishida who plays the quiet and shy assistant Yuji.  He really gives a brilliantly nuanced performance and it is probably my favourite from any Sion Sono film.  Without giving away anything that happens in the final third of the film, what I will say is that Yuji’s character goes through quite the transformation before the film’s end where he is no longer the meek, shy and timid character he appears at the beginning.  Ishida makes both extremes of Yuji’s character seem so believable, although I do think he was more comfortable within the role when he is the shy assistant (looking like he has just walked out of a J-Pop band).  While I always complain that Sono lets his actors overact, if there was one person who could be accused of this in “Strange Circus” it is Ishida.  He is right on the edge, so close to going over it in terms of overacting, but personally I think he does a brilliant job of staying on the right side.

If you think that the film starts to go a little insane in the second third, well hold onto your set, because it goes bat-shit crazy for the finale, as true identities are revealed and revenge is sought.  While this is the kind of stuff you expect from a Sono film, it is actually this third that brings the quality of the film down a little.  Do not get me wrong, it is incredibly entertaining, but it starts to work with the lowest common denominator in terms of gore and horror.  It starts to be less about the mind and more about blood.  Like I said, very entertaining but a little cliché despite how insane it all is.  There are also some incredibly poor and cheap looking special effects that really take you out of the film in this section, they just are not believable at all, in fact I was surprised at just how poor they were.  It is within this section that the visual splendor kicks off again, with the colour red being highlighted once more (mainly from the huge amounts of blood being spilt).

“Strange Circus” brings to mind two other filmmakers and their work, David Lynch and Takashi Miike.  While Sono is always being compared to countrymen Miike, “Strange Circus” is actually the first film that I thought truly resembled Miike’s style especially visually and editorially (there is a scene at the end that almost seems like a direct lift from Miike’s “Ichi The Killer”).   The similarities to Lynch have to do with his obsession with the mind and how it can hide something horrible a person has done or been done to them, in an attempt to continue to live a normal life.  This is ultimately what “Strange Circus” looks at, the life-long damage to a person (both physically and mentally) after being regularly abused.  While on the outside everything may look fine, within it could be a whole different story.  Another director that I was regularly thinking about while watching “Strange Circus” was Pedro Almodovar.  While the film is nowhere near as polished as his films, the melodramatic elements of the plot where similar, as well as the fact that I felt that Sono truly loved these demented characters he had created in a way that Almodovar himself does in his own films.

Overall, I was mightily impressed by “Strange Circus”.  I was happy to see that it tackled the themes of incest and sexual abuse very seriously, while also telling the insane story of an erotic novelist.  The film does end up becoming incredibly bloody but for those who like their cinema to be of the dark variety, I do not hesitate to recommend Sion Sono’s “Strange Circus”.  It is a great film that if not for a few hiccups near the finale, would have almost been a classic.

4 Stars.