shabondama elegy reviewed by joshua morgan
# Shabondama Elegy
# aka Tokyo Elegy
# dir. Ian Kerkhof
# 1999
# Thy rod and thy staff will bumfuck me. Thy will be done, thy kingdom come in my ass, forever and ever. Anus.
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# The above pseudo-biblical quote from one of the many graphic (but censored)* sex scenes in Shabondama Elegy pretty much sums up this masturbatory exercise in art-house experimental film.
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# The film is marginally poetic and sometimes clever as South African director Ian Kerkhof mixes sex and violence to explore what happens when a Dutch criminal (legitimate actor Thom Hoffman) meets a Japanese pornstar (real-life bukkake babe Mai Hoshino). Kerkhof then adds lube and bullets into the mix and the result is not at all surprising:
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# pornstar + lube = semen
# criminal + bullets = blood
# semen + blood = sticky mess of red & white bodily fluids
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# The film opens with a figurative blood bath as the tragic hero murders two Japanese police officers, and predictably (as if ripped from the pages of a textbook about experimental filmmaking) one of the final images of the film combines fluids with the colors red and white to depict the heroine washingly herself clean (both inside and out) of her slain lover in, quite literally, a blood bath:
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# Clever, and yet amateurishly cliched.
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# * NOTE: I’m not sure if the version I saw was censored to meet strict Japanese porn laws or domestic art-house policies, but I doubt seeing an uncensored version (if it even exists) would improve my reaction to this film. The director intentionally superimposed enough other images, like the floating head seen above, that the blotches over genitals hardly corrupted his artistic vision.
this review originally appeared here
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