Kimyô na sâkasu (Strange Circus) (2005)

Featured Audience Ratings

• Luke B

  
  In the style of his previous effort, Suicide Circle, Sion Sono deals with a difficult and dark subject in a horrific and slightly perverse way. He handles the scenes of child abuse with a twisted sense of genius. Our protagonist says how when she is abused she "becomes" her… More
  In the style of his previous effort, Suicide Circle, Sion Sono deals with a difficult and dark subject in a horrific and slightly perverse way. He handles the scenes of child abuse with a twisted sense of genius. Our protagonist says how when she is abused she "becomes" her mother. In the visual medium of film, this literally happens. Although this makes it possible for us to endure, the performances never allow us to forget who the character is meant to be. The plot soon starts to become even more twisted as it is not clear what is real, what is part of a novel and so on. There are dream sequences, memories and prose all tangling together to make a very unique narrative. At the end it all goes a bit too far and is bogged down by excessive exposition (I didn't need the dialogue, the unbuttoning of the shirt was enough to put the pieces together). The music is also fantastic, bridging the gap between Fargo's magnificent theme and the music of Amelie. It's certainly a difficult watch, but a rewarding one.

• Drew S

  
  Many call Suicide Club Sion Sono's finest film, and you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it had a lot of great qualities. But for all its imagination, it was incoherent and the only thing that really left any impact was the filming. Strange Circus, on the other hand, is the… More
  Many call Suicide Club Sion Sono's finest film, and you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it had a lot of great qualities. But for all its imagination, it was incoherent and the only thing that really left any impact was the filming. Strange Circus, on the other hand, is the product of a filmmaker who has matured and found focus, a wonderfully honed work that manages to be complex without purposeful obfuscation. It treads an interesting line between bizarre exploitation flick and schizophrenic, tormented narrative, and is one of the more unique films I've seen recently. The first half hour of the film really gets you in the gut. Basically, it's about a young girl named Mitsuko who is forced to watch her parents have sex, raped repeatedly by her father who is ALSO the principal of her school, then chased and beaten by her gradually maddening mother every day to the point where Mitsuko tries to attempt suicide. And most of you have probably stopped reading by now. This all is horrifically lurid, but it turns out to be the creation of a writer named Taeko, a paraplegic nymphomaniac who refuses to appear in public. It's through this that Sion Sono finds his justification for doing all these horrible things to a young girl - the implication is that, despite being a work of fiction, this all happened to Taeko - but it's still uncomfortable to sit through and that's one of my problems with the film. Kudos to the young actress, who can't have had much fun on this shoot. Anyway, the fact that Taeko is writing this way over-the-top depiction of household abuse lets Sono get away with all sorts of fun stuff. There's this ridiculously bad circus metaphor running through the whole movie, and we get to see a variety of fun-house freaks parading around in Mitsuko's psyche. There are really ribald, decidedly unsexy depictions of sex, all sorts of self-mutilation hijinks, and even chainsaw dismemberments. It's basically Suicide Club firing on all cylinders, four parts art and two parts badness. This all is amplified by Masumi Miyazaki, who plays both Mitsuko's mother Sayuri and Taeko. It is an absolutely beyond-the-call performance. There are so many emotions she has to express, so much to keep her head above, and she does it all perfectly. She knows when to play it straight and when to take it into Camp Land, but most effectively, she knows how to blur the line between the two, which allows for all sorts of reinterpretation and theorizing. She simply makes the movie. I was a little skeptical of her performance at first because it's in a different language, but next to Issei Ishida, who plays the assistant editor and body artist assigned to find the truth about Taeko, she's still fantastic. On the other hand, his acclimation to the insane final act is a lot less difficult to believe. The ending, on that note, is a little long-winded, but there's so much room for richness and speculation. Unlike Suicide Club, this movie actually lends itself to rational thought, instead of throwing things that seem artistic and meaningful at the viewer and letting them cobble something stupid together. Or maybe I'm just reading into this much more than I did Suicide Club. Goddamn it, Sono, the things you're doing to me.

• Christopher B

  
  Another amazing film from Sion Sono.  I still need to see Hazard and Noriko?s Dinner Table, but from what I?ve seen, Sono has recently shot up my list of favourite working directors.