Save your money for something good and enjoyable

ridiculous rating

Please don't spend money on this.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Another outlandish, tour-de-force thriller from Japanese director Sion Sono, GUILTY OF ROMANCE is quite unlike anything you've ever seen before. The previous movie in his loose trilogy of 'human condition' films was COLD FISH, in which a mild-mannered fish shop owner was sent on a journey of dark discovery, whereas this film is about a mild-mannered housewife who undergoes her own bizarre ordeal.If anything, GUILTY OF ROMANCE is even colder and more harrowing than COLD FISH, even though it's considerably less gory and not really a horror movie. Instead, this film is about a woman who ends up becoming a prostitute, so it's all about a dual journey of self-discovery and self-corruption. It's quite dark and depressing, although the film is so well-shot and well-made that it's quite gripping and very watchable. I found it had similarities to Kim Ki-duk's BAD GUY, although Sion's style is all his own.Taking the lead is Sono's own wife, Megumi Kagurazaka, who gives a quite astonishing performance. She's often required to go completely nude for the role, but far from being a mere voluptuous figurehead for the tale, she's oddly endearing perhaps because of her foibles. You can understand her. Equally as good in support is the frightening Makoto Togashi, playing a truly broken character who is one of the most disturbing I can remember seeing in a film. The movie is a visual masterpiece, featuring surrealistic touches and expert cinematography, and it seems to cover a heck of a lot of ground in a running time that isn't overlong. It's the sort of film you watch once and never forget.

A female detective arrives straight from indulging her extra-marital affair to a crime scene where the mutilated sexual organs of a female victim have been re-combined with a mannequin. We then follow three female protagonists in an ostensible exploration of female sexuality. Sex and murder in the first sixty seconds, part of an impressive sequence that presents bold, dark colours and incessant rain, and promises to analyse the margins of the human psyche in the vein of Seven.Sion, unfortunately, fails to deliver on the promise, instead indulging his juvenile penchant for sexual humiliation and big sausage jokes. One character drones on endlessly in pseudo-philosophical terms about female sexuality, dressed up for intellectual effect by lacing in Kafka, the females all the while slipping over to the 'dark' side. However, the sex scenes go on too long and are very stagey. The paint balls and asphyxiophilia don't seem to comment on anything except Sono's immaturity. The criminal investigation is non-existent as the detective visits crime scenes, has phone sex, then has the murderer handed to her on a plate. Two of the three females are both indulgent of and ashamed of their sexuality, while the third has an implausible double life as university professor and prostitute. (Coincidentally, the true story that this character is based on is a much more prosaic and toned-down affair). Sono sets out an interesting stall and there are some juicy dark themes to be explored here, but his writing is not up to the task. He is both fascinated and appalled by female sexuality, and ends up fetishizing it. The camera's gaze on the women is prurient and voyeuristic. Contrast this with the representation of the men who populate the film; servicing the adult films, pimping the women, paying to be johns... They sit on the margins of the frame, their behaviour taken for granted and natural. Only female sexuality is in any way problematized. Where Sono does excel is in the performances he gleans from his leads. Miki Mizuno as detective Kazuko Yoshida is a charismatic presence who deserved more screen time. Makoto Togashi puts in a kinetic shift as the disturbed Mitsuko Ozawa, managing to carry a role that is punctuated by risible scripted moments, such as a professor soliciting a male student on her own campus. The scene where Mitsuko sits down with guests for tea with her mother is very funny, darkly so, and manages to hit a high spot the rest of the film does not quite achieve. Megumi Kagurazaka, who Sono apparently married recently, also has some sharp comic moments in the early scenes of her buttoned-up marriage. Highly stylized, these moments nonetheless poke a stick at patriarchal attitudes still far too prevalent in 21st century Japan. Kanji Tsuda is impressive as the narcissistic husband. The one letdown is Ryuju Kobayashi, who in no way carries the malevolence his character is meant to convey. The wardrobe department clearly would like him to reference 'A Clockwork Orange', but he looks like an interloper from a boy band who stole a big boy's clothes.'Cold Fish' shows Sono has talent and for the sake of Japanese cinema I'd love to see him stretch himself and break out from the niche genre - somewhere between Pink and Torture Porn - where he has set up camp. A more disciplined script, tighter running time, and more mature engagement with story might make that happen.

Do you know that meme, saying "Dafuq did I just watch?!" well that's me right now. As a devout Horror fan, I've long learnt not to trust IMDb when it comes to genre tags. And yet, I found myself surprised by Guilty of Romance. Has the Horror genre really evolved into this mess? Is this what they call Horror in 2012?Given that I'm not Japanese and have never lived in Japan, I could only hope that I missed the entire message of this film, and that's only if I give it enough credit to assume it had one. What I didn't miss was a 100+ minutes Asian erotic film meant to appeal to the audience's libido rather than their brains or hearts. The amount of nudity and sex scenes bordered on shameful, and that's coming from a guy. If you're gonna shoot an erotic film - do it, by all means! Just don't make it appear as more than that.Yes, there was a story hidden there. Yes, the main actress Megumi Kagurazaka is gorgeous and sexy and has very lovely breast, as the audience is constantly and repeatedly reminded. The attempt to add a crime story, a murder, was at best unsuccessful. The way the story evolved was predictable and not interesting. Sorry to sound harsh, but I was expecting Horror/Drama, not a self indulging peep at sexual fetishes (they offer it all here! a raped woman enjoying the act, people strangling each other, and to top it off towards the end - a woman peeing!)Bizarre erotica with an attempt at a story with a meaning. Nothing more. Wanna watch it? Go ahead, just lower your expectations in advance. I have no clue how this movie rated above 4.

An excellent film, beautifully filmed and acted, reminiscent in many ways of Bunuel's Belle de Jour and Godard's Vivre Sa Vie.It's quite difficult to write more than this without including spoilers, but I'll try. The initial plot's very simple: we have a very subservient wife of a famous but somewhat trashy novelist living a very affluent life but not giving her any attention, sexually or in any other way with the possible exception of being extremely demanding of precision domesticity. Naturally this woman, about to turn 30 is frustrated (or rather, very confused by her situation) and when the offer of glamour modelling and a couple of sexually aggressive men come her way, things start to change.