A virtuosic genre spoof that's a homage to film and to martial arts

In Joshua Oppenheimer's peculiar and much admired documentary The Act of Killing the filmmaker invites some former Indonesian mass murderers to carry out mock reenactments of some of their crimes, lured by the glamor of cameras and makeup. In Sion Sono's rollicking, violent spoof Why Don't You Play in Hell?, which is pure fiction, let's hope, an amateur film crew volunteers to shoot an actual yakuza battle between two rival clans. Grand Guignol, paternal affection, and teen romance meet in Why Don't You Play in Hell?, as a boss arranges the bloody shoot-out movie shoot to please his thespian daughter and incarcerated wife, and a clueless, timid young man finds courage through his love of the girl, while the amateur director is in heaven. The result, which teeters between the serious and the comic, won't appeal to everybody, but Sono executes the odd tasks he sets himself with remarkable precision and consistency, tying together the chaos of gory battle with tidy narrative threads. Hell? is a well-made machine and, for those attuned to it, a pure delight.

Viewers will remember in J.J. Abrams' Super Eight the setup of boys running around shooting video, but Sono has more complicated and genre-playful things in mind, as well as spoofing many aspects of Japanese popular culture. He begins with a toothpaste commercial, its catchy tune, destined to echo through the film, sung by the ten-year-old daughter of a gang boss. She comes home to find the floor of the house swimming in blood, a shimmering visual set-piece worthy of Kubrick's The Shining (and Tarantino would like some of the scenes to come). There's been a clash between her father, "general" Muto's people and some inept hit men from from his enemy, Ikegami, and this short circuits Michiko's acting career. We've seen how the crazily enthusiastic would-be teen movie director and his little band of sound and camera guys, who call themselves the "Fuck Bombers," have recruited a would-be gangster in a yellow jump suit to join them to be a martial arts star instead of a killer. The director's proclivity for playing around with real gangster types will come in handy later.

The neatness of Sono's construction is shown in how he jumps forward ten years and keeps everything in place. The guy in yellow is still with the now aging amateur filmmakers, who still have yet to make a real film. Michiko is now a tough, frustrated yakuza girl. The feud still goes on. And eventually Muto and the grinning, borderline nutty Hirata Don, the ever-budding Spielberg (or Miike) come together and plan a movie shoot that will feature Michiko, while the two clans duke it out for real. The last virtuoso half hour consists of this battle and its aftermath.

As Asian film expert Derk Elley says in his review , Hell? "sets a new marker in creative lunacy," and is "destined for instant cult success" as well as incidentally invigorating Sono's waning career "after a spell of good but increasingly less out-there movies." It's also true as Elley says that Sono "even outguns a director like Miike — evoking real emotion when working at a pulp level." And thus "by the time the movie reaches its final, delirious half-hour, it's much more than just a blackly comic bloodbath with characters who are simply genre stereotypes." Amazingly, we know and care about these people, while enjoying the bloodbath that engulfs them. A self-reflexive final post-shoot scene reassures us that the principals, while bandaged and battered, did not lose life and limb as depicted. This remarkable tour de force also retains its charm to the end. It's a little long at two hours, but this is a very well-oiled machine. Also as Elley has noted, the music track adds a lot with its use of classical in weird arrangements alternating with "things like jangly guitars." Much of this is composed by the prolific Sono himself. Only for the right audience, but this is a sure winner.

Why Don't You Play in Hell?/地獄でなぜ悪い/Jigoku de naze warui, 130 mins., Sono's 31st feature, debuted at Venice 2013 and continued at several dozen other fests including Toronto, London, and Tapei continuing up to the present (Nov. 2014). Drafthouse plans a rolling out US release beginning 7 Nov. 2014 at IFC Center, NYC. See Drafthouls's web page for other venues to come.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.