Frame to Frame
A Little Romance and Plenty of Shame
Sion Sono likes to raise the bar just to see how high he can go, expanding his cult status and fan base around the world. He’s a controversial poet-filmmaker whose Guilty of Romance unearths sexual desires and dark pasts in very colourful style.
Coincidentally, after watching this film, I saw Steve McQueen’s Shame from the festival’s main selection and the paralleled subject matter from the two called for a single article.
Romance shows Izumi Kikuchi (Megumi Kagurazaka) as the loving and extremely bored wife of a famous writer. Her days consist of getting his slippers and making him tea when he gets back from his 12-hour shifts. She wants to do something exciting with her life before she turns 30 and finds just that when she is approached to be a model.
Soon enough, modeling lingerie turns into soft-core porn and beyond. When she meets the prostitute/professor Mitsuko (terrifying Makoto Togashi), the film kicks into overdrive and Izumi’s life is changed forever.
Shame tackles the taboo subject of sex addiction and portrays it through Brandon (Michael Fassbender, in the performance of his career), a successful businessman who watches porn as regularly as he brushes his teeth. His life seems to be in control living alone, but once his sister, Sissy (Carrey Mulligan, another career-defining performance), couch-surfs her way into his life, things get loose around the seams and his dangerous addiction reveals its true face.
While Romance examines the transformation of a Japanese woman’s character through a lustful reawakening, Shame focuses on a New Yorker’s sexual demons and the consequences they have on his life. Visually, both films score high marks: Sono’s use of extravagant colors with Tokyo’s nightlife and Bobbitt’s cinematography in Shame is Oscar-worthy with perfectly lit bars and nightclubs, and perfectly dark nights.
Thematically, Sono uses sex as a catalyst to show the heavy weight of Japanese ideals, while McQueen makes things more universal by treating sex as a drug—effectively portraying the shell of an addicted man.
If you’re unfamiliar with the works of McQueen and Sono, it’s best to take a look at their earlier work—McQueen’s Hunger (also starring Fassbender) and Sono’s Suicide Club will give you a good idea of how widely different these two filmmakers are in their approach to similar subjects.
For this writer, Shame hits all the right notes and—with the help of Hans Zimmer particularly—is a haunting masterpiece. Romance is far less subtle in approach and style, but is very entertaining nonetheless and sheds light on a fascinating society.
Both succeed in one thing, however: sex will be the furthest thing from your mind after leaving the theatre.
Guilty of Romance trailer
