Writing/Directing/Cinematography/Editing/Production Design by Shinya Tsukamoto
Music by Chu Ishikawa
Starring
Asuka Kurosawa
Yuji Kohtari
Shinya Tsukamoto
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THERE ARE EIGHT MILLION STORIES IN THE NAKED CITY-
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Review by William D. Tucker.
WARNING: SPOILERS. I JUST DON'T KNOW HOW TO TALK ABOUT A SNAKE OF JUNE WITHOUT GETTING INTO THE DETAILS.
In Tokyo, a perverted maniac with a flashbulb camera terrorizes an unhappy married couple into rediscovering their sexuality. First within their imaginations, and then within each other. But, ultimately, it is in their imaginations where the real action happens.
The wife works as a suicide crisis hotline counselor. The perverted photographer uses her job as a vector to stalk her and take pictures of her by seemingly masquerading as a person in crisis. The pervert photographs her in private moments, and then he blackmails her into staging a series of solo pornographic fantasies.
The husband-a workaholic clean freak who works at some vague office job-gets rougher treatment. He's drugged, forced to watch a live sex'n'death-by-drowning show deep underground, and then he's strangled by a robot tentacle penis while being kicked in the face over and over again. Hey, this is a Shinya Tsukamoto film, after all.
This twisted shutterbug, as it turns out, isn't suicidal, but he is on a kind of suicide mission for he has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So, nowadays we might think of him as Pervert Walter White, but I prefer to think of him as Pervert Edmond O'Brien-you ever see D.O.A.?
Our shutterbug also seems to be in cahoots with some kind of underground sex'n'death cult or maybe it is merely an enforcement agency. Tokyo is portrayed as a concrete and steel maze where people dash about in the perpetual rain between apartments and offices, and not much contact with anything beyond work and home. Lives are so regimented that a diligent stalker could time people's movements, and always know where to hide for maximum peeping. Lives are so regimented that a secret organization has evolved to shock people out of their conformity and anhedonia. The shutterbug with the robo-tentacle prick is, perhaps, the chief enforcer of this cult/erotic enforcement agency.
Now, what the shutterbug does is, clearly, reprehensible. But he also punishes himself by driving a nail through his hand. See, ya'll, it's a faith-based film! The crisis counselor tells him that this is no act of redemption, and that there's no atoning for what he has done. This is a turn for her, because now she's expressing aggression, something she could not do even as her hubby walked all over her, barely acknowledging her presence even as she dutifully cooked him his favorite foods. Hubby even blows off attending a funeral with her so he can sit in a diner and be soothed by staring into the perpetual rain against the window.
The shutterbug provokes hubby into stealing a handgun off of a cop, and thereby turns the workaholic clean freak into a literal street criminal so that he may realize the domestic crimes-condescension, emotional coldness, shaming, controlling-that he has been commiting against his devoted wife.
In the end, husband and wife see each other for who they really are . . . and they fuck even as the police pound on their front door. The hubby has been humbled into realizing what an asshole he has been, and the crisis counselor is turned on at the sight of him all dirty and wet and pathetic and desperate. A Snake of June ends within their moment of fucking. Presumably, the police battered down the door, and dragged hubby off to prison, leaving the crisis counselor to pursue her own course-but we end with the fucking on this one. You can do that in movies. (The recent flick Licorice Pizza has a similar "let's just stop before the next disaster" style of ending by having things go to credits before a possible political assassin seizes focus and turns it into a different, bleaker kind of film.)
I think that's what happened.
A Snake of June is a fast film. It's under ninety minutes. It's a hate triangle flick, somewhat similar to Tsukamoto's earlier film Tokyo Fist, in which bored people pummel and pierce themselves into more intense modes of being before exploding into geysers of crimson corn syrup. A Snake of June is more internal. The shutterbug stalker becomes a sinister voice inside the head of the crisis counselor, and a threatening vigilante pervert against the workaholic clean freak hubby. The stalker is clearly a maniac, but he achieves some good in his own mind by stripping the lies away from a dysfunctional relationship. A Snake of June implies that the underground sex'n'death cult/erotic enforcement agency is working in the deep background of many of the repressed citizens of Tokyo.
A Snake of June is a jittery-hysterical softcore thriller-a Skinamax flick with ideas, goddamnit! It has a memorable black'n'white'n'blue color palate. Unstable, stalkery handheld camera work is used to evoke eroticism as opposed to incomprehensible action sequences. Tsukamoto knows how to deploy handheld camera artistically and kinetically as opposed to using it to cover up dodgy fight choreography. The three lead actors are teriffic. Tsukamoto, of course, plays the stalker, much as he plays similar sinister characters in Tetsuo the Iron Man, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, Tetsuo the Bullet Man, and Nightmare Detective.
How convincing one finds this craziness may well depend upon your receptiveness to Tsukamoto's purposefully deranged and conflicted view of the city of Tokyo. It's a city of culture and humanity and joy and sexuality. It is also a place of isolation, aggression, disconnection, anhedonia, suspicion, hypercompetitiveness, greed, workaholism. Most ambiguously, Tokyo seems to be a place of radical transformation which can go in any number of directions: death, birth, life, rebirth, change, stasis, peace, war, reconstruction . . . just keep an eye out for the shutterbug with the robo-prick. Dude's intense!
