Review of Guilty of Romance (2011) by Mike M — 25 Sep 2011

Sono thinks nothing of staging cackling, cacophonous, wackily lit and framed scenes in which the women are coaxed into giving up their bodies, and the viewer realises we've come a long way from Naruse and Mizoguchi, even though the themes of these directors - chiefly, the oppression of women in a patriarchal society - remain much in evidence here.

.. He yields a fairly astonishing performance from real-life glamour model Kagurazaka, straddling the nice girl/nympho divide with a commendable lack of inhibition; re-viewing her first and final scenes, it's difficult to believe this is the same actress, and Sono is clever in engineering the character's lowest points to coincide with her most conventional acts, warping even the everyday in her gradual spiral downwards.

Certain aspects are less successful. In the two-hour European release cut, the murder-mystery angle is underdeveloped, and barely appears to go anywhere, in part, one suspects, because Sono can't bring himself to consider anything as procedural and linear as a Marple or Poirot case; you may also take away from "Guilty of Romance" no more than a general sense that Japan is pretty f**ked-up, where the more expansive "Love Exposure" and "Cold Fish" permitted marginally more complex responses.