TIFF 2013 Review: R100 (2013)

Cast: Hitoshi Matsumoto, Nao Ohmori, Eriko Satô
Director: Hitoshi Matsumoto
Country: Japan
Genre: Comedy | Drama
Official Website: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.

The Midnight Madness series at the Toronto International Film Festival is dedicated to reveling in violence, grossness, camp, and schlock. The film’s are supposed to shock as much as entertain, to provide a respite from the more serious fare that plays throughout the day by just being as bonkers as possible. In that regard, R100 is an unmitigated success—this is one of the most bizarre films in recent memory. It is hard to judge a movie that willingly aspires to be a “midnight movie” in terms of its quality. R100 is a bad film; in fact, for long stretches, its outright terrible, but that doesn’t mean it won’t make a fun viewing experience for people worn out on weighty dramas and tired of indie quirk fests. The weirdness of R100 is entirely its own, for better and often for worse.

The film plays out like David Fincher’s The Game on bad acid, as Katayama becomes increasingly desperate to break his contract with the club and the film, which begins on a ridiculous enough note escalates beyond your wildest dreams into a symphony of nonsensical stupidity and terrible twists.

The film follows Takafumi Katayama (Nao Ohmori), a middle-aged sad sack who sells furniture by day and grieves his comatose wife by night. Katayama hopes to escape his numbness by joining a secretive S&M club that promises to excite him in ever-changing ways. On this, it delivers, and the film quickly becomes a parade of leather-clad “Queens,” each with their own increasingly unlikely skill. Things begin with your standard BDSM fare, as a woman he meets in a bar kicks him in the head and then throws him down a flight of stairs, and escalates from there into sushi smashing, vocal impersonations, and eventually a woman (known as the “Queen of Gobbling”) who devours people whole like a boa constrictor.

The film plays out like David Fincher’s The Game on bad acid, as Katayama becomes increasingly desperate to break his contract with the club and the film, which begins on a ridiculous enough note escalates beyond your wildest dreams into a symphony of nonsensical stupidity and terrible twists. Shot like grindhouse of the ‘70s (and including a meta-gag that is both the film’s best idea and only remotely amusing), the film feels akin to its D-movie brethren for sheer willingness to commit to its idea. There are scenes of visual invention (including some of the club’s interiors, which involve a carousel and an indoor pool), but mostly the film gets by on its complete satisfaction with its own strangeness. In its best sequences (most of which appear early in the film), there is a melodic oddness to the proceedings, but by about the halfway point it has become a cacophony of madness too in love with its own weirdness to actually be engrossing beyond its very surface.

R100 often seems like it is self-consciously trying to be the sort of bad movie that finds great success in a midnight scenario, a The Room-like catastrophe that will worm its way into the heart of audiences for just what a mess it is, but intentionally setting out to be awful is a difficult proposition. This is a decadent sort of dreadful that its hard to find endearing, especially by the final act, which literally involves S&M ninjas and a suitcase full of grenades. If it was half as fun in execution as it sounds when I type it like that, I would be first in line for the film, but by the time it arrives, R100 had lost me entirely.

R100 often seems like it is self-consciously trying to be the sort of bad movie that finds great success in a midnight scenario, a The Room-like catastrophe that will worm its way into the heart of audiences for just what a mess it is, but intentionally setting out to be awful is a difficult proposition.

Director Hitoshi Matsumoto saps the film of color until it becomes a gray and drab as the world Katayama envisions he lives in. It’s a beautifully ugly color palette the director uses very well, and it too contributes to the film’s dated, grindhouse feel. Matsumoto also clearly knows his way around the dark side of grief, as Katayama’s suffering is palpable. There’s an emotional core to the first half of the movie that roots the lunacy in tragedy very effectively, but sadly that disappears when the film tries to eat itself whole like the Queen of Gobbling gone autosarcophagic. If the movie is supposed to be funny on its own merits, it fails, but it is even more frustrating to view as the sort of thing that intends to be unintentionally funny. There’s an oft-repeated speech in the film where the club’s owner speaks of how increasing exposure to masochism can turn a masochist into a sadist, and this is perhaps the most patent metaphor for watching the film itself: if you let it hurt you long enough, eventually you’ll turn your anger elsewhere. The film’s favorite of its own jokes is the idea that it is making viewers suffer for its own amusement, that its audience is full of masochists submitting to the Queen of Midnight Madness. For some, this pain will be a glorious catharsis, a beautiful and welcome departure from the serious cinema that is packing their days. But R100 failed to turn me into a sadist: I can’t tell anyone else to watch this movie.

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Jordan Ferguson

Sr. Staff Film Critic

Jordan Ferguson is a lifelong pop culture fan, and would probably never leave his couch if he could get away with it. When he isn’t wasting time “studying the law” at the University of Michigan, he writes about film, television, and music. In addition to writing for Next Projection, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Review To Be Named, a homemade haven for pop-culture obsessives. Check out more of his work at Reviewtobenamed.com , follow him on twitter @bobchanning, or just yell really loudly on the street. Don’t worry, he’ll hear.

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