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thom hoffman and mai hoshino in shabondama elegy
japanese postcard, 1999

Starring: Thom Hoffman, Mai Hoshino
Written and Directed by: Ian Kerkhof
Eclectic DVD
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“Thy rod and thy staff will bumfuck me…thy kingdom come in my ass…”

Can a gritty, no-exit gangster movie brimming with hardcore sex and degradation also be a tender love story filled with poetic dialogue and an experimental arthouse feature? The answer, of course, is no, but Tokyo Elegy, from South African underground filmmaker Ian Kerkhof, swings for the fences in its effort to stitch all of those elements together in its 90-minute running time. And while the end result is frequently confusing and more than a little pretentious, it’s never boring.

Dutch actor Thom Hoffman (Dogville) plays Jack, a criminal on the lam after killing a pair of cops. He runs into porn actress Keiko (played by real-life Japanese porn star Mai Hoshino) in a bar, and after banging her brains out in the bathroom (a poster for Kerkhof’s film Wasted! adorns one wall), he moves into her apartment to hide out. The pair quickly falls into a round-the-clock routine of drugs and fucking, but the romance has a time limit; Jack has apparently ratted out a former partner, and the local yakuza plan to settle the score within seven days. As his final days slowly wind down, Jack attempts to do good by helping Keiko deal with her childhood memories of sexual abuse.

As mentioned earlier, Tokyo Elegy has a lot on its plate, and at times, the heavy drama and Jack’s frequent poetic monologues (the film is inspired by the poetry of Jack Henry Abbott, a two-time convicted felon who wrote the best-selling In The Belly of the Beast), combined with some serious moments of arthouse ennui—be prepared for lots of staring into space and pregnant pauses—make for a trying experience. Add to that an atrocious sound mix that muffles most of the dialogue, and even the most devoted underground film freak may want to start tearing out his or her eyebrows within a half-hour’s time. But the sex is vigorous and definitely hardcore (though as with all Japanese porn, it’s digitally obscured), and Kerkhof keeps the film visually stimulating by unleashing a torrent of digital video effects, some quite overwhelming (epileptic viewers should avoid the scene in which Keiko watches Richard Kern’s Fingered), but all of which help to illustrate the impulsive, no-holds-barred nature of Jack and Keiko’s relationship, and the fragmented state of Jack’s mind as his fate draws nearer with each minute. Tokyo Elegy is definitely not everyone’s cup of green tea (which, the film tells us, is the soul of Japan), but for those seeking something outside their usual DVD diet, it’s a challenging but intriguing change of pace.
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– Paul Gaita

this review first appeared on sleazegrinder.com

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

ian kerkhof, international film festival rotterdam, 1999

for russian language information about shabondama elegy (tokyo elegy)
please click here

ETRANGE FESTIVAL 2002

SHABONDAMA ELEGY
de Ian Kerkhof
Par Yves GAILLARD

SYNOPSIS : Un ex-taulard, patron d’un bar de Tokyo, sait qu’il ne lui reste qu’une semaine avant d’être assassiné. Il entame alors une histoire d’amour désespéréeet volcanique avec une jeune prostituée.

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POINT DE VUE
 
Shabondama Elegy (1999) est le récit rétrospectif, conté par la jeune femme endeuillée, de l’amour sensuel et total entre une entraîneuse japonaise (interprétée par Hoshino Mai) et un occidental en cavale, pourchassé par la police et les yakusas : et à qui, de ce fait il ne reste qu’une semaine à vivre. Hors de toute chronologie, le film s’offre comme une expérience de la confusion.

Ian Kerkhof est relativement connu pour son film Wasted !, une plongée abrasive dans le milieu techno hollandais. Dans son œuvre méconnue, mentionnons seulement le titre d’un de ses documentaires, et dont les sonorités expriment à merveille le mélange d’agressivité transgressive et de lyrisme qui pourrait caractériser son cinéma : Merzbow, Beyond Ultra-Violence. Ça ne s’invente pas, et ça inspire d’emblée une saine curiosité.

Débutant comme unpolar, Shabondama Elegy abandonne très vite les rives du narratif pour adopter une démarche esthétique violemment hétérogène, aux confluents de formes documentaires et expérimentales. Les influences occidentales et japonaises s’y heurtent de manière aussi brutale que les corps des amants : la musique minimaliste et primale de Otomo Yoshihide se mêlent à des balades folk, faisant éprouver la différence radicale de deux cultures dans leurs expressions du sentiment. De même les temporalités, les régimes d’images : tout concourt à souligner les opérations de collage, au sens pictural du terme. Ayant tourné en DV, Kherkof compose des images saturées et grouillantes, retouchées jusqu’à la défiguration la plus totale par un usage intensif d’effets de superposition et d’incrustation. Dès lors la trajectoire amoureuse des deux amants, qui en passe par leurs jeux sexuels, se donne à voir dans les violences faites à une image hardcore “ originelle ”, défigurant pou mieux atteindre une vérité poétique.

Librement inspirée de la vie de son actrice principale, la Porno Star Hoshino Imai, Shabondama Elegy questionne également la pornographie comme le lieu d’une soumission forcée, ou la réduction de soi à l’état d’objet de plaisir s’offre comme la conséquence d’une vie brisée par les sévices sexuels. À ce propos, Kherkof s’attaque avec une ironie féroce à la méthode psychanalytique en en donnant à voir très littéralement la nature masturbatoire.
 
Précision quant au titre, énigmatique : il trouve son origine dans une comptine connu de tous les enfants japonais. “ Shabondama ” exalte le sacrifice nécessaire au nom de la communauté, au travers du récit de la coutume imposée aux mères adultères d’abandonner dans la montagne ou dans une rivière le fruit de leurs amours interdits. Venu répondre aux questions du public à l’issu de la projection, Kherkof cita son actrice principale pour qui la barbarie de cette comptine synthétiserait l’âme japonaise. Shabondama Elegy ne se distingue dès lors pas par son absence d’ambition même si l’extrême foisonnance du film a le don d’égarer son spectateur.

Titre : Shabondama Elegy
Réalisateur : Ian Kerkhof
Scénario : Ian Kerkhof
Acteurs : Thom Hoffman, Hoshino Mai, Ito Kiyomi
Camera : Tsuji Thomohiko
Montage : Ben Hendriks, Ian Kerkhof
Direction artistique : Yoshimura Kei
Musique : Otomo Yoshihide
Production : Suzuki Akihiro
Distribution : Upstream Pictures
Pays : Japon, Nederland
Duree: 86min
Annee: 1999

originally published by objectif cinema

# 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.
#
# 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.
#
# 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:
#
# pornstar + lube = semen
# criminal + bullets = blood
# semen + blood = sticky mess of red & white bodily fluids
#
# 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:
#
# Clever, and yet amateurishly cliched.
#
# * 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

hard to watch but a masterpiece!, 4 April 2002
10/10
Author: ben morris (shiryuo) from munich, germany

okay, i’ve seen this film only on video, so i don’t know how/if it works on a big screen. anyway, shabondama elegy is something really unique, a crazy mixture of yakuza and romance filled with strange colours, cutting techniques and inventive camera angles; like Ian Kerkhof is as usual. the story is really hard to follow, it took me 5 times watching it and i’m still not sure if i understood everything. the film’s beginning is quite normal though. tom hoffmann is arrested by the cops in tokyo (probably because of drugs) and by a chance he manages to escape. after picking up a girl (mai hoshino)in a nightclub in shinjuku, he stays at her place because the cops and the yakuza are both after him. at this point, the film gets really hard to watch, ian kerkhof does his best to deconstruct the storyline and alienates the images in any possible way. in the end, jack gets shot. sounds a bit spoiling now but it’s not really because you see the showdown already in the first 10 minutes, so you know the end in advance even before you’ve seen the whole. sometimes you see keiko (mai hoshino)telling her story as if it was a flashback, the film ends with the opening sequence. it’s like david lynch with a videocam dropping acid in tokyo, the film is free of any clichés and conventions, it should be considered like abstract video art. you just can’t put it in any category, and i think this is what ian kerkhof intended. already because of this, the film gets 10 to 10, it is something i haven’t seen before. and i’ve seen lots of betacam-trash films. o.k. the sound recording isn’t the best and the dialogues are senseless, but there is still ian kerkhof’s brillant camera work and a very well told, lyrical story. i liked it specially because of its ambition to create something new. i think it must be considered from this point of view. so i suggest to watch it for a second time and again and again, you’ll always gonna find something new.

this review originally published on imdb.com

mai hoshino and thom hoffman in shabondama elegy

Hello Aryan,
Shabondama Elegy screeening tonight was perfect! The theater was full (200 seats), no room, the audience was watching quitetly, breathless, and frankly applouded in the end. My congratulations! I found the film a masterpiece. It was me myself who translated it into Russian, and it was a real pleasure for me to work with the text and put all the subtle components of the film together, to study how it works Thank you! I enjoyed it!

Andrej Smirnov, Izhevsk film club, Russia