Antiporno (5 Stars)

What an absolutely brilliant film! Sion Sono has made something completely crazy, unpredictable and wonderfully disturbing, but for me the real reason it works so well is Ami Tomite. This is probably her best performance, and she has to do an extraordinary amount with the character of Kyoko.

At first, Kyoko appears to be completely in control. She's a successful young artist, surrounded by colour and luxury, and she treats everyone around her as if she's the most important person in the world. Tomite throws herself into this performance with enormous energy. She's loud, theatrical, arrogant and deliberately over-the-top. I thought she was excellent from the opening scenes.

Then the film turns everything upside down. The Kyoko we've been watching is revealed to be a character in a film being made, and the seemingly confident woman is actually an inexperienced actress who's being treated terribly by the other actresses. The person who appeared to have all the power is suddenly the person who has none.

This is where Tomite is really amazing. She's not simply playing two different versions of Kyoko; she's playing an actress who's playing a character. The exaggerated performance we saw earlier isn't Tomite overacting. She's acting as Kyoko acting in a film. Once we understand that, those wild gestures and outbursts suddenly make perfect sense.

There's an extraordinary extra layer to this, too. In the interview on the disc, Tomite explains that Sion Sono deliberately didn't want her to know what was happening in the film. That's the perfect way to make "Antiporno". Kyoko is constantly trapped in situations she doesn't understand, while Tomite herself was apparently being kept uncertain about where Sono was taking the story. That uncertainty becomes part of the performance.

And Kyoko is trapped everywhere. She's trapped by her family, by her memories, by the film she's making and by the various identities she's forced to adopt. Even when she appears to be completely free, she's performing. The extravagant apartment that initially looks like a playground increasingly feels like a cage.

Tomite captures all these different sides of Kyoko brilliantly. She's confident, aggressive and hysterically funny, but underneath that there's a frightened and vulnerable young woman. Then Sono takes us back to Kyoko as a schoolgirl, and Tomite has to find another character again. She makes all these changes convincingly without ever losing the sense that they're different pieces of the same person.

The scene involving Kyoko's supposed first sexual experience is another example of the film playing with performance and reality. She doesn't actually have sex with the man; she asks him to grind against her so that it will look as though she's having sex on camera. Even here, she's performing an identity rather than simply experiencing something. The film later turns the memory into something even more surreal, with the sexual imagery giving way to an empty forest. It's another reminder that we're never quite sure whether we're watching reality, memory, fantasy or a performance.

That's what makes Tomite's job so difficult. She isn't merely playing Kyoko; she's playing Kyoko playing Kyoko, while the film continually changes the rules around her. Yet she makes it all work.

There are plenty of things in "Antiporno" that I didn't completely understand, such as the film crew appearing in Kyoko's home, but I didn't mind. The film isn't interested in giving us a straightforward explanation of everything that happens. It's interested in showing what it feels like to be trapped inside a world where the boundaries between reality and performance have completely broken down.

And Ami Tomite is at the centre of it all. She can be outrageous one moment, vulnerable the next and completely convincing in both roles. It's a remarkable performance in a remarkable film.

Antiporno is brilliant. And Ami Tomite is absolutely amazing.

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