The Circus of Lost Identity

Sono Shion is a director of bizarre taste, as his filmography shows: his most successful film was called “The Suicide Club” (2002). Now he is back with this grotesque story of incest, murder and loss of identity in a rich Japanese family: an 8 years old girl is forced by her father to witness her parents’ sexual intercourses; then she is forced to have sex with her father while her mother witnesses the scene. The insane competition between the two women culminates in a series of murders, suicides, mutilations, mental disorders. Twenty years later, a beautiful writer on a wheelchair tells the story of the two women in a novel she hectically writes 24 hours a day; but who is she really? And who is her mysterious literary agent? What secrets do they hide?

Although the subject is dramatic and tragic, the director frames it in a colourful, fast-paced and mind-blowing shape: the “Strange Circus“ of the title is a Fellini-style set that represents the chaos in the young protagonist’s shattered mind; built up as a triumph of lights, colours, gothic imagery, surreal figures dancing around an ubiquitous guillotine, the visual side of this film violently hits the eyes of the public; surprisingly, it manages to communicate the sense of trauma and confusion in a much more effective way than a normal psychological drama could do. A trio of wonderful actresses carry the weigh of three characters (whose identities eventually melts in an unpredictable way) that conceal their grief under incongruous, unsettling bright smiles; the devilish power of sex, alternatively seen as a source of pure pleasure and of perversion, is conveyed not only by explicit, graphic scenes but especially by the intense faces of the three bewildered women.

Unfortunately the solution of the plot is difficult to understand, but that’s what happens when you see a Japanese film with only German subtitles and no English at all! Nevertheless, this work remains thought-provoking, enjoyable, but most of all is a shocking moral lesson; no doubt Sono has relied on a very original script, but he has enriched it thanks to a powerful classical soundtrack, divided into childlike themes and solemn elegies, and high speed editing. An epitome of post-postmodern aesthetics with remainders of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanley Kubrick, “Strange Circus“ is too creative to be shown in the Official Competition, and is aptly placed in the Forum of the Berlinale. Yet hopefully it will be released (or I should say “unleashed”) in Europe and will haunt a wider public.

Vera Brazzoni

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2006