This is a film with a subject matter that would totally disgust me if it were made by any other director. The scenes of depravity and violence against women make me feel sick in my stomach, but Sion Sono's unique portrayal of madness lifts the film to a high level of art.
The film is about prostitution, literature and Kafkaesque alienation. There are also streaks of feminism running through the film, but the final scene seems to undo their validity.
The characters are so unfeasible that they border on absurdity. Mitsuko is a university profesor who leads a double life as a prostitute in Tokyo's sleazy love hotel district. She justifies it by saying that being a prostitute is female empowerment. Men have to pay for what they want.
Izumi is the bored housewife of a best-selling author. She feels that she's wasting her life, so in the week before her 30th birthday she becomes a model for an agency that sells videos of beautiful women. Her boundaries are constantly being pushed back. She says she will only appear in sexy clothing. Then she's persuaded to appear nude. Then she's persuaded to have a man on top of her pretending to be intimate. Finally she's persuaded to perform actual sex acts for the camera. When Mitsuko approaches her on the street and suggests she becomes a prostitute, she has nothing left to lose. She's degrading herself from one level to the next, however much Mitsuko claims that she's elevating herself.
The whole story is told in flashbacks during a murder case. The dead woman has been decapitated, so it's not clear who has been murdered or why.
If I had to sum up the film in one word, I would call it insane.
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