Original Title: Môju
Directed by Yasuzu Masumura
Written by Yoshio Shirasaka (based on the story by Rampo Edogawa)
Cast: Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori and Noriko Sengoku.
Runtime: 90 min.
Japan, 1969

Here’s a curious little pleasure from a japanese cult master. An intense study on body, intimacy and lunacy all together in a very light S&M form that never takes itself too seriously; it’s deep alright but it’s more poetic than barbarian.

Michio is a blind sculptor that intends to create his utter masterpiece, a sculpture piece for the blind. Helped by his mother he kidnaps a beautiful model, Aki, in an attempt of keeping her locked in his studio to serve as his muse.

Aki is a very spoiled girl and tries everything to escape but in the end the couple bond in a very carnal way, in an intense and obsessive relation that culminates with the total embrace of body and soul.

The wharehouse that serves as the studio is decorated with oversized female body parts, breasts, legs and the whole, and in the middle (where most of the action takes part) are two huge headless female sculptures. This only adds to the perfect claustrophobic atmosphere that the movie emanates. Beautiful!

This is truly a pure low budget underdog. More than a mere example or exercise, Blind Beast is carefully mastered, even if sometimes things get a little too silly to be true as the dialogs are too deep and too poetic for a casual viewer. You can reach a boiling point where you just want to watch the plot and shut up the two leading characters but this only adds to the strangeness of the whole thing and can become quite enjoyable.

Masumura never uses any kind of close ups, except in some minor details of the beautiful artist’s studio, it’s quite engaging to see this intimate tale told in a cold and detached form, at least on the surface because the characters are too intense and the tight studio where most of the movie is set creates a bizarre claustrophobic sense of pleasure. The viewer is personified in the model Aki – the only one who’s not insane (at least in the beggining) and you get along the movie like Aki does – trying to get away from this nightmare first by force, then by using psychological treaths, then slowly beggining to realise its fate and resiging and giving up to pleasure.

But it’s more than pleasure, take note. It’s way deeper than that as Aki starts to get fondness for the emotionally weak Micho she too begins to love him in a twisted way – like he does to her. It’s a kind of metaphor for the deranged relationships of our time.

The actors, specially Shirasaka (who plays the blind beast) give outstanding performances, carefully angled by truly beautiful shots. It’s poetry in motion.

This movie was made in 1969, and it shows; the avant-garde experiments in colour and form are what make this utterly enjoyable, even if the story tends to become too insane for most, and the last half of the film tends to develop slowly but it’s an intense experience that shall not be ignored by those seeking desperate and intense feelings. And, on a side note, this is a sexual story told without a hint of sex or nudity. Remarkable. And still remains fresh nowadays.

Heartbreak Score:

Crash

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.
Cast: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosana Arquette, Peter MacNeill.
Music Composed and Performed by Howard Shore.
Runtime: 98min.
Canada, 1996

Allmovie | IMDb | Wikipedia

This obsessive adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel turns into a hard psychological affair of sexual compulsion and hardcore demency when a group of emotionally detached individuals find pleasure, sex and escape in car accidents.

A truly weird film about the deepness of our modern world’s perversion, a deranged visual experience that puts your head in an exhausting twist.

Commonly, for most of us human beings, a car accident fuels our desire for voyeurism in a twisted way. It’s something behind our control, we need to watch. Ballard’s novel relates sex with technology written in a cold, detached way. Cronenberg’s movie is no different. Right from the start he puts you in the main role – you, as the voyeur, as the eyes that fuel every emotion; the technology and the characters as mere pawns in the twisted world of wreckage.

Filmed as an almost diabolical nightmare, there is no certainty of time, days become night almost vaguely, the characters are almost pathetically empty – yet, deeply disturbed, deeply rooted into their intense fetishism. More than a mere visual journey, it twists your brain as if you were in a permanent car crash.

Here, the crash is just a mere metaphor for our consumerism, for our detachment of emotions. We root in objects, in technology. Here the sex is the extreme personification of our evilness, of our constant pursue of the next object to attach.

This wonderful and heavy disturbed film is such a weird experience, yet so violently real that you become glued to its visual dementia. It’s almost as if the plot advances with no sensation of time or place, and the only real thing to hold on is the exact same love the characters embrace. Gorgeously shot in deep blues and whites, a gorgeous disturbing soundtrack by Howard Shore, intense sexual intercourse and a great cast of actors, just brilliantly off-beat.

But because the plot advances in a dreamlike state and the characters appear out of the blue like dead bodies and stay like that in a trance for the entirity of the film, because the atmosphere is deeper than the actual notion of conflict-resolution, because the soundtrack is shrieking, Crash is almost a bad movie, one of those you hate for life, because it is so true, so intense. This is, truly, a heavy movie, not for every taste.

Most fans of Cronenberg that grew up with his dark low budget fantasies about body modifications and paranoia in the 80s seem to be put of by Crash, as if this is one of the less serious of the “serious period” of the master craftsman. But in my opinion Crash suits the filmmaker’s vision as good as any other bizarre film he made: the twisted characters and the wrecked cars and Arquette’s body. The eeriness that shivers your perceptions is pure Cronenberg.

Yet, if you feel compelled and secure of your own dilemmas, watch it and you’ll never see a car accident with the same eyes. I’m having difficulties getting in a car at night without visualizing Elias Koteas character Vaughan coming up the other side of the lane.

Painful, but just plain gorgeous for those who don’t fear giving up their secrets and embrace their darkest sexual deviance.

Buy this DVD from Amazon:
Crash (Uncut) [1997] [DVD]

Heartbreak Score:

More Screenshots: