You can’t call your film “I am a Pervert” and not expect a certain sort of reaction. Then again, the debut feature from illustrator Hajime Anzai isn’t quite sure what reaction it wants. Part indie journey movie about a conflicted folk singer and part coming of age comedy in which a middle-aged man is forced to own his “perversion” following a horrific bear attack, HENTAIDA (I am a Pervert) (変態だ) is nothing if not perverse.
The nameless protagonist (Kenta Maeno) begins his feature-length voiceover by letting us in on his ignominious teenage history. A shy and lonely boy, he had no girlfriends or even friends of any kind. He took to his room and practiced guitar while the others his age misspent their youths in more exciting ways. No great academic success either, he took a year out to resit his college exams but even then only got into a second-rate institution. It was, at least, in Tokyo – his dream city, and therefore a partial answer to his dreams but when he overslept and missed orientation he found himself on a different path altogether when a large woman with giant frizzy hair press ganged him into joining the university’s rock group.
Bored with his lessons, the protagonist starts to enjoy playing in a band even if he was kind of forced into it. When the bandleader is arrested, the remaining members form a new mini group – The Rejection Letters, and go on to some minor success. Life, however, comes to the protagonist’s bandmates who cut their hair and get regular jobs after uni like you’re supposed to. Now calling himself “Reject Letter”, (or just “Reject” to his friends), the protagonist has been married for five years and has a young son. He’s happy, but he cannot rid himself of the need to visit regularly with an old groupie, Kaoruko (Tsukifuna Sarara), who happens to be a dominatrix (and his sometime manager).
Shooting in black and white, Anzai breaks into colour only twice – during a lengthy and exaggerated sex scene, and then again on a scene of extreme violence. The implication is that Reject’s world is cold and grey, devoid of sensation outside of physical communion with his wife and the final, visceral shock which leads to the inevitable declaration that he is indeed a “pervert”. Truth be told, Reject’s “perversion” is not such a serious one – his early relationship with Kaoruko awakened him to sadomasochism and he has been unable to give up this part of his life or indeed share it with his wife, continuing an “arrangement” if not quite an affair whilst being consumed by shame.
Events come to a head when Reject is invited to perform at a Christmas gig way up in the snowy mountains with some other acts from the circuit both musical and variety. Under the twin tortures of a very boring coach companion and Kaoruko’s desire to provide some “excitement”, Reject’s mind begins to crack. Remembering his wife’s desire to come see him play, he becomes paranoid that she’s hiding somewhere in the (extremely sparse) crowd and will therefore discover the existence of Kaoruko. His shame is so great that he doesn’t seem to realise it might be perfectly normal for his wife to meet his manager and not realise she’s also a dominatrix, and so he steals Kaoruko away and runs off up a snowy trail to certain doom where a very strange adventure awaits him.
Anzai tries to have it both ways, so to speak, in mixing an arty, ironic aesthetic with strange sex scenes running from the semi-explicit weirdness of the consensual lovemaking between Reject and his loving wife, and the slightly less consensual one with a rapidly disintegrating Kaoruko in subzero, bear infested territories. Modesty fog couples with a man throwing vibrators at a rampaging bear as odd mirrors of the implicit and explicit while Reject progresses towards his end goal of being able to own his “perversion” though it’s far from clear whether it’s loud and proud or a grudging confession considering what there is lying in wait in the woods. Perhaps too strange and lowkey for its own good, HENTAIDA (I am a Pervert) does at least live up to its name if only in its bizarre tale of a repressed man’s passage to some kind of self acceptance through a surreal, shame filled adventure.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
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Windows on Worlds 