Love Will Tear Us Apart: Snake of June (2003)

March 6, 2012 Love Will Tear Us Apart, NP Approved No Comments

Cast: Asuka Kurosawa, Yûji Kôtari, Shin’ya Tsukamoto
Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto
Country: Japan
Genre: Drama | Mystery | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review of Snake of June is a part of Rowena’s coverage of the 6th Annual Globus Film Series at the Japan Society in New York, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

If water was only somewhat integral to Vital, in Snake of June it becomes fundamental. In this film, one of his most accomplished and concentrated works apart from the early films that make up his Tetsuo series, Tsukamoto drowns his characters in water to speak of repressed desire and bodily/embodied experience. Water here is poignant with regards to re-feeling one’s way or re-sensing one’s body in the world, and conveys for Tsukamato both the literalness and monstrosity of bodies as communicating vessels of desire and pain. In this way, Snake of June is not too far removed from the Tetsuo films and their exploration of human-machine bodies. This time, Tsukamoto’s nightmarish human-machine body intrudes upon the lives of a seemingly innocuous couple and breaks the monotony of their lives. The result is a perverse variation of a love triangle guided by a cancer-stricken man who finds a new will to live and combat his own bodily pain by psychologically and physically tormenting this couple.

Water here is poignant with regards to re-feeling one’s way or re-sensing one’s body in the world, and conveys for Tsukamato both the literalness and monstrosity of bodies as communicating vessels of desire and pain.

Iguchi (Tsukamato), the cancer-stricken man, comes to know of Rinko (Kurosawa Asuka) and her husband Shigehiko (Kotari Yuji) when he calls a suicide hotline where Rinko works. Unbeknownst to either one of them, Iguchi begins to taunt Rinko and Shigehiko with phone calls, letters, and photographs, on separate occasions. First Iguchi taunts Rinko to show and act upon her true desires, which he has captured in photographs of her touching herself. He then blackmails her, resulting in an extended sequence wherein Rinko is subjected to tortured self-confrontation and self-pleasure following Iguchi’s dictates. Then Iguchi taunts Shigehiko by kidnapping him, forcing him to watch a peep show, and physically assaulting him in multiple ways, as if twistedly trying to (re)awaken in him a passion absent in his marriage of routine.

Shot entirely in a blue filter that accentuates the presence of water on skin, cement, and other surfaces and with a wobbly, invasive, and clinging camera, Tsukamoto weaves together an eerie landscape-dark room of eroticism and existential torment. Of course, the camera plays a large part in making this landscape visible. Iguchi is a man-machine precisely because the camera is essential in bringing together torment, pain, pleasure, and desire, for himself as well as for Rinko and Shigehiko, individually and collectively. The culmination of their individual and collective pains and pleasures takes place outdoors in the pouring rain, in an erotic exchange of looking and being looked at. In this sense, with the element of water so prominent in the film’s imagery, these three characters are like wild flora compelled by the downpour to push and victimise one another through vision and the gaze. The blue filter lends the film a documentary and raw feel that complements the notion of flora and element of water, a feel that is missing in the too-polished look of Vital. Needless to say, the joint performance of Tsukamoto, Kurosawa, and Kotari are pitch-perfect in all of their blissful torment. A take on the power of three in a way that not even Hong Sang-soo would have imagined.

89/100 ~ GREAT. Shot entirely in a blue filter that accentuates the presence of water on skin, cement, and other surfaces and with a wobbly, invasive, and clinging camera, Tsukamoto weaves together an eerie landscape-dark room of eroticism and existential torment.

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