Tokyo Elegy Review By Royce Icon
Tokyo Elegy
Written and Directed by Ian Kerkhof
Tokyo Elegy (also known as Shabondama Elegy) is more or less an excellent manifestation of everything I love about indie filmmaking. It has that “fuck you, we’’l make a movie in a few days and it’ll kick your movie’s ass” attitude that I ador, but it actually doesn’t suck. This has a very DIY vibe, yet the overall quality is superb.
Indie aesthetics aside, Tokyo Elegy is full of lots and lots of sex, weirdness, violence, and general cool shit. And I do mean A LOT of fucking. But it’s not just porno by any means. There is a plot and you see the overall relationship of the two main characters, not just the fucking. The fucking scenes are actually quite interesting though, with the male character reciting the lord’s prayer in some scenes. The cinematography and the intimate almost dogma 95 nature of them make them unique as well.
The story is told in a very abstract way, which adds to it’s charm. It’s more or less a kind of standard yakuza love story but executed in a very unstandard fashion. There are a lot of film effects and filters used here, and some of them look better than others, but only a few of the filters look bad and they don’t use them for very long anywhay so who cares? My only complaint here is that my copy of the DVD had the genitals censored, but outside of that I have no beefs with this film. Tokyo Elegy is a beautifully artistic Lynchian art porn masterpiece. If you dig transgresive cinema then this is a must-see flick for sure.
this review first appeared on the excellent drowning in odium website
August 12th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Thanks for publishing the interview/ mentioning Odium! I’ll try to have those
questions out to you tonight!
September 1st, 2006 at 6:44 pm
[…] The Snuff Collection is a necrology and an autopsy. In Kaganof’s self-reflexive ‘snuff’ the mediamatic body of the late Ian Kerkhof (1964-1999) is cut into, thoroughly examined and ultimately fetishised. Before he re-emigrated to his native South Africa, the young film-maker caused a furore in the Dutch film-world with films like Kyodai makes the Big Time (1992), The Mozart Bird (1993), Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994), Wasted! (1996) and Shabondama Elegy (1999). In addition to those films he also staged pornologies, elements of which reappear in The Snuff Collection: The Solipsist (1992), Stations of the Cross (1990) and, la sequence des barres paralleles (The Sequence of the Parallel Bars) (1993) based on a script by Pierre Klossowski. […]