Tag: Shunya Ito

Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Shunya Ito, 1988)

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“Poor things, born in the wrong time,” a woman laments of two girls perhaps not that much younger than herself yet as trapped by the age of militarism as anyone else. Adapted from a short story by Edogawa Rampo, Shunya Ito’s gothic mystery Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Hanazono no Meikyu) effectively skewers militarism’s hypocrisies and lays bare the dehumanising effects its nihilistic philosophy has wrought on the nation as a whole. When killing is almost an imperative, life has little value and brutality seemingly the only acceptable response to mass violence.

Ito conjures a sense of haunting by adding a modern day framing sequence in which the abandoned hotel is an eerie space of cobweb-ridden collapse. A wrecking ball arcs back and fore, threatening to unearth a truth long buried and this is after all a mystery, at least in part. With extraordinary finesse, the camera travels from the ruins into the hotel of old as a woman enters the frame. We are now in 1942. This is Yokohama, a harbour town, and so the “hotel” is filled with military personnel though transgressively it also seems trapped in a kind of before time. The sailors dance to American standards such as Georgia on my Mind and Goodnight Sweetheart though otherwise at war with America. All eyes are on sex worker Yuri (Hitomi Kuroki) and her dashing Zero Fighter pilot boyfriend, Takemiya (Tatsuo Nadaka).

But later we learn that Takemiya hated planes and was scared of heights to the point that it kept him up at night. Apparently from a military family, he felt unable to avoid going on with this militaristic charade and saw no future for himself other than glorious death. Everyone at the Fukuju Hotel is in their way already dead and chief among them the madam, Tae (Yoko Shimada), who becomes the prime suspect when her unpleasant husband Ichitaro (Akira Nakao) is murdered during the night. Her nemesis is however. Ichitaro’s sister, Kiku (Kyoko Enami), who has just been deported from the US where she had been living after selling herself into sexual slavery in order to financially support Ichitaro after their parents died. 

Kiku had been Tae’s madam, bringing her over from Japan at 17 and as she will do again, actively sitting on her face when she screamed and fought after being assigned her first customer. This brutalisation seems have driven Tae towards a desire for escape, but that was only available to her by marrying Ichiro who then betrayed his own sister to open another brothel that he ran with Tae before leaving the US and setting up in Yokohama in light of the declining relationship between America and Japan. Though she herself was brutalised, Tae can only earn her freedom by exploiting other women. At the beginning of the film two young girls, Mitsu (Mami Nomura), 18, and Fumi (Yuki Kudo), 17, arrive from the country excited for their new lives but without fully understanding what they’ve signed up to. Like Tae, Omitsu fights back when chosen by a sleazy, nouveau riche factory owner who made his money making planes for the navy, and while Tae tries to talk her down Kiku simply sits on her face and tells the man to do his business. Afterwards, Mitsu tries to kill herself and her friendship with Fumi is strained by her internalised sense of shame. Determined to save enough money to redeem Fumi’s contract before the same thing happens to her, she throws herself into sex work and begins to lose Fumi’s respect. 

It’s the two girls who see this place as haunted most clearly, firstly in catching sight of Tae wandering the corridors in her nighty on the night of her husband’s murder, and then by Fumi’s belief she has seen the pale ghost of a geisha only to realise it was just a wig on a shelf. Mitsu says it belonged to a woman who contracted syphilis, went mad, and then died, a fate she now fears may also befall her. Like many of the other women, the girls have been sold into sexual slavery by their parents most likely because their families are poor and they can’t feed their other children. This kind of rural poverty is of course exacerbated by the financial demands of imperial expansion while the dehumanising elements of militarism, the belief that everything must be devoted to the war effort, allow this heinous relic of the feudal past to continue. Sons after all belong to the emperor and will become brave soldiers fighting for their nation, while daughters have no intrinsic value other than as wives or sex workers to be advantageously traded or sold on.

It’s this that Fumi comes to realise and resent. She insists that she will never return to her home or parents because at the end of the day, they sold her. Yet she feels little sympathy on learning that one of the other women is a notorious criminal who murdered her foster parents because they too took girls in to sell them on. The hotel somehow becomes the nexus of all this pain and violence, a place the women can never escape. Ito does his best to make clear that this is hell by travelling through the air ducts, on towards the eerie glow of the furnace and the dank passages running under the hotel and out into the sea. The boiler room connects all other areas of the hotel and exposes all their secrets in the sound that travels through the ducts. But some secrets are designed to remain forever hidden until the wrecking balls of the contemporary era force them into the light and confront us with this buried history. Until then, the hotel exists in a ghostly state, Ito flooding it with hazy images and visitations that read as eternal apparitions of this place’s inescapable despair trapping all within its labyrinth of unresolved longing.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Curse of the Dog God (犬神の悪霊, Shunya Ito, 1977)

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By the late 1970s, Japan was a very prosperous place and the cutting edge of modernity yet old beliefs die hard and those who run afoul of a natural order they assumed had long been forgotten will pay a heavy price for their arrogance. After a four-year hiatus following the third of the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, Shunya Ito returned with a strange slice of folk horror The Curse of the Dog God (犬神の悪霊, Inugami no Tatari) in which it is indeed the city invaders who have transgressed these ancient boundaries in their wilful indifference to the natural world.

The conflict between these two Japans is clear in the opening sequence in which three men pass through a tunnel in a truck bearing the logo of a nuclear power company and emerge into a village where a group of boys jump out from behind a row of tiny haystacks wearing masks made of leaves. The boys crowd around the van asking the strangers why they’re here and they jokingly tell them that they’ve come to look for “treasure,” which turns out to be a quest to find uranium in the local mountains. Otherwise uninterested in the village or the landscape, the men back their truck into a dilapidated roadside shrine which then collapses, and subsequently run over a little boy’s dog which had attempted to stop their car by barking fiercely at them. Rather than stop to apologise or comfort the boy who is cradling his dead dog in his arms, the men sheepishly drive off as if embarrassed. 

Of course, the shrine turns out to belong to the Dog God who is guardian deity of these mountains and now incredibly annoyed not just by the destruction of the shrine and killing of the dog, but by the men’s intention to tear the natural world apart looking for something which could prove very destructive even if they claim they want to use it responsibly to fuel the economic rocket which is Japan in the 70s. The Kenmochi family, the head of which, Kozo, is the local mayor are very receptive to the firm’s entreaties and immediately grant them access to their land while arranging a marriage which at least in part dynastic between Kozo’s daughter, Reiko (Jun Izumi), and the head of the expeditionary group Ryuji (Shinya Owada). But once they return to the city, the other two men die in mysterious circumstances, one entering a kind of trance and walking off the roof of the hotel after the couple’s formal wedding reception and the other attacked by a pack of wild German Shepherds in the middle of Tokyo. 

Reiko is quick to exclaim that it’s all the fault of the Dog God, though it’s never quite clear whether or not she is aware that her family is the subject of an ancestral curse because they themselves offended the deities by getting their hands on the land cheaply when it was used as collateral for a loan. In contrast to the Tarumis, the family of Reiko’s best friend Kaori (Emiko Yamauchi) and her little brother Isamu (Junya Kato) who is the boy whose dog they killed, the Kenmochis put on heirs and graces and as if they were the ancestral aristocracy of this area rather than having made a speedy class transition thanks to someone else’s misfortune and the vagaries of the post-war era. The Tarumis, meanwhile, live in a much more humble home and dress in a much more traditional mountain village manner. Patriarch Kosaku (Hideo Murota) point-blank refuses to sell his land and will have little truck with Ryuji or the mine once it opens, leaving the family regarded as outcasts within the village. 

But then there is a definite and literal pollution signalled by the arrival of the prospectors. At a meeting, it’s suggested that the sulphuric acid they’re using to flush out the uranium in inaccessible areas of the mine could contaminate the local groundwater which is a problem when many families are still taking their water from wells but they all laugh it off. Sometime later Ryuji is horrified to see dead fish floating in the river, while his own in-laws, the older generation of the Kenmochi family, are also killed by ingesting contaminated water. A rumour arises that the culprit is the Tarumis who have poisoned the wells out of spite, and when Ryuji tries to raise the alarm after getting a positive result for sulphuric acid in the water supply the company tell him to pin it on them instead. 

The intrusion of modernity has interrupted the careful, if woefully feudal, balance of the village with terrifying and tragic consequences. Yet Kosaku is also surprised, asking how a city man like Ryuji could really believe in something like a “curse”. The shamans they bring in to do a ritual also blame everything on the Terumis, adding the suggestion that the ill will is motivated by Kaori’s sexual jealousy over Ryuji giving rise to yet another interpretation of the curse’s origin besides the Kenmochi’s class transgression and the unintentional offence caused by the destruction of the shrine. Then again, perhaps it really is all because of the Dog God in a great confluence of coincidences that have led to this incredibly strange and unfortunate situation. In the end, even the film’s purest character, the Kenmochi’s small daughter Mako (Masami Hasegawa), is possessed by the evil spirit and made to take her revenge with a remorseful Ryuji desperately trying to repair what he himself broke in the acceptance that he should not have come here and was the catalyst for this confrontation with fate. Weird and haunting even in its bizarre obscurity the film nevertheless makes a case for the protection of the dark heart beating at the centre of the contemporary society which speaks of something older that cannot be crossed and most specially by those hellbent on a hubristic path to prosperity that has little respect for the land.

To Trap a Kidnapper (誘拐報道, Shunya Ito, 1982)

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One of a number of films released in the early ’80s critical of the police force, To Trap a Kidnapper (誘拐報道, Yukai Hodo) draws inspiration from a real life case of child abduction but suggests that the police largely just get in the way and are only interested in apprehending the culprit rather than ensuring the boy’s safety. In any case, unlike the similarly themed High and Low, the film devotes most of its focus to the kidnapper’s desperation as a man apparently left behind by the rapidly rising tides of prosperity. 

Yet somewhat perversely the film opens with a scene of children playing and seven-year-old Hideyuki (Motoyoshi Wada) getting into trouble for flicking toy discs at his friend and deskmate Kaori (Kaori Takahashi). Hideyuki is then made to stand on his own in the playground as a punishment, though quickly makes things up to Kaori by gifting her the plastic discs he was playing with. Neither of them know it, but the children share a grim connection for it’s Kaori’s father Kazuo (Kenichi Hagiwara) who is responsible for kidnapping Hideyuki on his way home from school in the next town over.

Both Hideyuki and Kaori attend a prestigious private institution but are being raised in very different circumstances. Kazuo was once a successful cafe owner but was swindled out of his business and is now in massive debt to a shady loanshark named Moriyasu who’s sold his promissory note on to a third party debt collector. Hideyuki’s father, Noboru Mitamura (Fujita Okamoto), is a doctor though there’s nothing that suggests the family is anything more than financially comfortable and they aren’t immediately able to get the money together for the ransom. Noboru has to ring round all his friends, family, and random acquaintances begging for emergency loans but without really being able to explain why he needs the money. Just having seen it noted on a school register that Hideyuki’s dad was medical professional Kazuo assumed they’d be a good target for a kidnapping and is in any case resentful of their nice middle class life. 

His wife, Yoshie (Rumiko Koyanagi), is in turn resentful of Kazuo for their reduced circumstances later lamenting that they moved house, swapped their big car for a smaller one and are even going to rehome their dog but if Kazuo is really so deeply in debt, something he had kept from her, then nothing they do really matters because their lives will never improve. What she can’t understand is why Kazuo was so keen on keeping Kaori in a private school that he’d get himself into financial hell rather than make a more pragmatic decision to let her go somewhere else. The obsession perhaps hints at his class anxiety, wanting his daughter to stay in a more resolutely middle class environment otherwise in strong contrast to the hometown he later visits where his elderly mother operates a loom in a moribund fishing village which the youngsters are slowly leaving for jobs in factories in neighbouring towns. 

Perhaps in over his head, it at one point looks like Kazuo is about to dump Hideyuki’s body in the sea only to realise police divers are already searching the area. Despite himself, he begins to care for the boy though doesn’t really know what to do with him. He feeds him bread from convenience stores and keeps him tied up in the boot of his car wrapped in several blankets without really considering the possibility that he may die of cold or hypothermia left outside in the freezing winter. Realising the distraught parents have called in the police despite his warnings not to, he is too afraid to accept the ransom and is therefore at something of an impasse given he can’t very well give up the boy without getting the money.

Meanwhile, as the Japanese title implies the tale is alternately told from the perspective of the reporters at Yomiuri Shinbun who are originally quite annoyed by the police’s request for a news blackout to avoid panicking the kidnapper, suggesting it’s an infringement on their free speech if coming around in the acceptance that a child’s life is at stake. A rookie reporter, Kotaro (Shin Takuma) is involved in a dispute with his fiancée Tomo (Miwako Fujitani) who is having second thoughts because he’s always working while her parents are pressuring her to consider an arranged marriage. Kotaro refuses to write one of the dummy articles they’re putting together in the event that Hideyuki is killed describing it as morbid and irresponsible, but is very involved with the ongoing press investigation which simultaneously seems more rigorous than that of the police and accidentally gets in its way. A “suspicious car” that’s noticed outside a drop sport turns out to belong not to the kidnapper but a reporter on a stakeout wasting the police’s time.

Even they are eventually conflicted, the officer in charge on the ground later letting the Mitamuras leave on their own for the final drop empathising with them as a fellow parent and acknowledging the reason everything keeps going wrong is because the police got involved. Yet his boss orders him to follow them anyway, reminding him that the only job of the police is to catch the culprit seemingly indifferent to whether or not they rescue the hostage unharmed. Their tactics are quite naive, not considering that Kazuo will obviously realise that the Mitamuras are surrounded by undercover officers because they keep using the same ones and it’s odd to keep seeing that couple from the coffee shop everywhere they go. The big break in the case happens by accident just because a couple of traffic cops decide to ask a random car a few questions.

In any case, it’s Kaori who ends up suffering. She and her mother are also victims, unfairly hounded by the press and left with nowhere to go and no-one to turn to having had their lives turned upside down by her father’s desperate decision. He didn’t even know the kids were friends or the effect his actions would have on his daughter. Kazuo hadn’t really thought any of this through but acted only in jealousy and resentment, wanting payback against the Mitamuras for their nice middle class life and his own slice of the pie that he felt had been denied to him. In the end, the only winners are the press who can rejoice in selling their newspapers even if a remorseful Kotaro resents himself for taking a paparazzo photo of Yoshie and Kaori trying to leave town quietly. On seeing his article pasted on pillars at the station, even Tomo starts to change her mind reflecting that if he’s working on a story like this then perhaps working too much isn’t such a dealbreaker after all even if everyone seems to have forgotten about little Hideyuki in the headlong rush to dominate the newsstands by trying to lure a kidnapper into their trap.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり けもの部屋, Shunya Ito, 1973)

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beast-stableAt the end of Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, Matsu – the “Scorpion” of the title, had enacted parts of her revenge but lost even more friends and allies along the way. Still filled with an intense rage, she wandered away from her imprisonment towards the dawn and a free, if uncertain, future. It’s here we find her at the beginning of Beast Stable (女囚さそり けもの部屋, Joshu Sasori – Kemono Beya) – a fugitive from justice, but a seemingly calm one. Until, that is, she is cornered.

Beginning in an extremely memorable opening sequence, the film zooms in on Matsu riding a subway train like any other young woman when she gets spotted by a couple of policemen who decide to try and take her in. Whipping out her knife from under her coat, Matsu slashes away but is almost caught when one of the policeman handcuffs her. She reacts to this situation in a typically direct way by simply hacking the policeman’s arm off and running away with it.

Hiding out in a graveyard and gnawing at her macabre bracelet in an attempt to get it off, Matsu strikes up an improbable friendship with prostitute Yuki (Yayoi Watanabe). Yuki is harbouring a dark secret in that she keeps her brain damaged brother locked up in a back room where she is forced to satisfy his sexual urges lest he attack other women.

While working as a seamstress, Matsu becomes more and more involved with the underworld and its collection of pimps and madams, each eager to profit from the weakness and misfortune of others. Eventually, after becoming too much of a problem, Matsu is locked up again – but this time inside the birdcage of a dangerous and eccentric yakuza mama-san, Katsu (Reisen Lee), with the corpse of a less fortunate victim on the other side of the bars. New names are about to appear on Matsu’s ever growing grudge list as the wrongs done to others begin to outweigh the pain of those enacted on herself.

Beast Stable differs from the first two films in the series as it mostly takes place in the “free” world until it reenters the prison environment for the final stretch. Matsu may be out of jail but she’ll never be truly free and her intense inner rage might give her away if it weren’t for her the fact her face is plastered all over the city adorning wanted posters in every conceivable location. With no particular target for her vengeful spirit, Matsu is in survival mode but her growing alliance with Yuki and the cruelty of the underground sex industry quickly awaken her old fire.

This time the big bad is another woman – a cruel madam, willing to protect her investment to the max. When she finds out one of her girls has been hiding a pregnancy, she insists on an abortion even though the baby is six months or so along. Kicking and screaming, the pregnant woman is subjected to a horrific procedure conducted by a drunken doctor which is neatly contrasted with another abortion which is carried out with a much higher level of medical care. Needless to say, Matsu cannot let this one go and makes another of her daring and mysterious escapes to enact her revenge. As she leaves, she’s become a fury of vengeance once again – her face pixelated by the surgery window, shaving her of her identity.

Though more grounded in reality than Jailhouse 41, Beast Stable is still selling the ballad of Matsu as she continues her trajectory into legendary heroine status. Always playing a long game, Matsu has the uncanny ability to escape from any holding pen save the one that burns inside her mind. Having satisfied her personal desire for revenge, Matsu moves on to the cruelties of the wider world and those that bully and misuse already vulnerable people. Her sense of greater responsibility grows as her humanity begins to return through her friendship with Yuki which eventually becomes a deep alliance between two equally trapped women.

At the end of the film we’re told that Matsu served her prison sentence and was released, but no one knows what happened to her after that. Her apotheosis is complete as she becomes the legend – a wandering heroine, meeting out justice in a cruel and indifferent world. Kaji continues to excel in her performance of the near silent Matsu, burning with rage and resentment in every scene. Beast Stable would be Ito’s final contribution to the series and acts as a suitable conclusion to the trilogy as Matsu finally becomes Scorpion in our imaginations and, strangely, our hearts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (女囚さそり第41雑居房, Shunya Ito, 1972)

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scorpion-2Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (女囚さそり第41雑居房, Joshu Sasori – Dai 41 Zakkyobo) picks up around a year after the end of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion and finds Matsu (Meiko Kaji) tied up in a dingy prison basement, apparently left bound and in solitary confinement for the entire interval. Once again directed by Shunya Ito, the second instalment in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series is another foray into the women in prison field but Ito resolutely refuses to give in to the exploitative genre norms, overlaying his tale of individualistic rebellion with an arthouse sensibility that has a much wider scope than its ordinary vengeance driven narrative may suggest.

Matsu may have been lying bound and gagged in a dingy underground hole for the best part of a year but today is a special day and sadistic prison warden Goda (Fumio Watanabe) is going to let her out to be shown off in front of a visiting inspector who’s paying a final visit before Goda is promoted to a top job in Tokyo. When Matsu makes a lunge for Goda, the inspector is so afraid that he wets himself, sending the other woman into a frenzy and resulting in a riot. Once again the entirety of the prison is punished, but this time Matsu is singled out for a public punishment gang rape by Goda’s goons. This kind of humiliation is too much for her fellow prisoners who instantly turn on her, but their violence provides an opportunity for escape and before long Matsu is on the run, again.

At the end of the first film, Matsu had accomplished her first round of vengeance – against the man who orchestrated her downfall and the men who secured it, but ultimately she wound up a female prisoner once again. Though Goda may have had her hidden away because of her habitual escapism, Matsu had not given up as we see from her attempts to scrape the floor away with her spoon held tight in her mouth. Barely speaking, Matsu is an unstoppable column of pure rage but an elegant one, supported by her self contained restraint.

Her anger this time is directed towards Goda himself, especially after his despicable organised punishment rape that was designed both to break her own spirit once and for all and also to damage her in the eyes of her fellow inmates who are intended to see her defeated and destroyed. The guards are a stand in for society at large, using sexual dominance and social position to keep their women in line. The visiting prison inspector makes a point of telling Matsu that “they” don’t hate her personally – they’re there for her, to help her “recover” and become a functioning member of society. Which is ironic because Goda does hate her personally as he holds her responsible for the damage to his eye sustained in the previous film. His last act before moving on is one against Mastu – an attempt by the forces of authority to crush her individual rebellion and use their victory as a coercive tool to force others to conform.

In this way, Matsu’s position as a member of a subjugated class is less important than her status as an agitator but these are women who have each suffered at the hands of men. As an extremely theatrical sequence sung in the traditional form informs us, the women who escaped with Matsu committed their crimes out of love or jealousy. Poisoned rivals, dead lovers, even children murdered to get back at their philandering father in some Medea level psychotic rage which ruins the perpetrator even more than the intended victim.

Later while the women are enjoying their brief taste of freedom, one of them is brutally raped and murdered by a troupe of feral men who boast about the wartime atrocities they committed before descending on a lone woman like a pack of rabid dogs. The others take their revenge for their friend, but also for all the women who have met a similar fate inflicted by a male dominated society which sees them as something to be controlled and then made use of, little more that cattle hemmed in and milked until dry.

As in the first film Ito makes use of expressionist techniques and strange angles to give his film a more elevated feeling that might be expected but this time he adds in a surrealist, spiritual dimension as with the old woman who sings the stories of our heroines and then dies only to bury herself in leaves and disappear into the ether, like some forgotten deity of misused women. Likewise, when one of the prisoners is raped and murdered, the men throw her body into a nearby river like an empty beer can but the waterfall behind her suddenly runs with blood as an expression of the violence which pollutes the natural world. A bus suddenly splits in two, separating our subjugated women from the violent men who mentally sentence them, given free reign simply because of their sex. Ironically enough, our last glimpse of of Matsu takes place in the reflection of Goda’s glasses and then in his false eye when she is suddenly rejoined by her compatriots for a triumphant dance of freedom on a city rooftop.

Even stronger than in the original Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion, Jailhouse 41 further advances its ideology of free individuals battling the conformist authority of the state all filtered through the prism of the patriarchy. Matsu’s vengeance is personal, she keeps her distance from the other women who do not seem inclined to band together to oppose the forces which oppress them so much as seek a wary, temporary alliance of necessity, but seeing them all reassembled in spirit at the end brings a larger dimension to Matsu’s victory which now seems much less like solving a practical problem than a deliberate strike at a wall which was solely designed to keep a certain group of people in their place. The jail is broken, all that remains is to choose to escape its restraints.

Original trailer (English subtitles, NSFW/gore)

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (女囚701号/さそり, Shunya Ito, 1972)

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scorpion-701

Meiko Kaji had already become a familiar face in Nikkatsu’s genre output when she took on the role that would come to define her career at only 25 years of age. Toei’s Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (女囚701号/さそり, Joshu Nana-maru-ichi Go / Sasori) would launch a series of similarly themed films and create a national pop culture icon in its central character. Based on a manga by Toru Shinohara, Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion is, at heart, a women in prison film and a cornerstone of the pinky violence genre but first time director Shunya Ito has more on his mind than salacious thrills and offers up a noticeably nuanced approach to his material filled with impressive art house flourishes.

701 is the number printed on the back of the prison uniform worn by inmate Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji). She makes a valiant escape attempt with a fellow prisoner, Yuki (Yayoi Watanabe), but the pair are caught and put into solitary confinement where they experience torturous treatment both at the hands of the guards and their fellow prisoners. Mostly known as Matsu but also given the nickname of “Scorpion”, Prisoner #701 is not exactly popular with the other ladies in the joint who seem to resent her escape attempts and quiet dignity, annoyed by her above it all demeanour.

Matsu has just one mission in life – vengeance, on the man who wronged her, on the society that allowed her to be wronged, and on the prison system with its sadistic guards and turncoat inmates. Once an ordinary, law abiding woman, Matsu had the misfortune to fall in love with a vice cop who convinced her to go undercover in a yakuza club to get some vital info he needs to bust it. However, Sugima (Isao Natsuyagi) turns out to be the biggest crook of them all and was merely using her to try and take out the local yakuza to get in with a bigger yakuza boss and key into a slice of the drugs trade. Matsu is brutally gang raped after her cover is blown and ends up being sent to prison after making an attempt to ice her former lover with the desire to get out and complete her mission the only thing that’s keeping her going.

Ito begins with an ironic scene in which one of the prison guards is receiving a commendation for his honourable service, Japanese flag flying proudly behind above, until the occasion is interrupted by the escaped prisoner alarm. Later Ito puts the yakuza boss in a building bearing the large banner “Beautiful Soul and Harmony of Japan” and he even adds in an expressive moment as Matsu surrenders her virginity to Sugima, staining her white sheets with a large red circle. Society is corrupt everywhere from Sugima’s bent copper to gang raping yakuza and the prison system itself.

The guards are effectively running their own little empire, cut off from mainstream law enforcement and left to their own “corrective” impulses. Ito gives us salacious shower scenes and women being marched around in the nude but he places us in the place of a voyeur, making it plain that the prison guards are sating their lust for power through humiliating their charges in sexual dominance and violence. Divide and rule is the name of the game as a top tier of prisoners are “employed” in various prison tasks earning them a different colour uniform and a status bump. These ladies are even worse than some of the male guards and are responsible for much of the cruelty inflicted on Matsu and Yuki during their time in solitary.

Inter-prisoner conflict is not the central theme of the film as Matsu continues to plan for her eventual escape and revenge on the man who has ruined her life. A slight spanner is thrown in the works when an inside woman is recruited to take Matsu out, but Matsu is painted as a the ultimate vengeful warrior. Barely speaking (the bulk of her dialogue is actually voice over for her flashback scene), Matsu waits silently, observing and plotting. Biding her time she manages to take an extremely skilful and poetic revenge against her solitary abuser despite her hands and feet being bound, and when a police mole is placed in a cell with her Matsu sees through the ruse straight away. Seducing her new cellmate, Matsu neutralises the threat with ease maintaining her trademark intense elegance all the way through.

Though the synopsis smacks of cheap and nasty exploitation Ito doesn’t see it that way and films with an art house aesthetic rather than a salacious eye. Matsu’s flashback takes a very theatrical form with a rotating set and Matsu remaining present in the corner as she narrates. Her rape scene is grotesque and nightmarish, shot through a see-through floor as her attackers grin and gurn away at her like fairytale monsters. Likewise, when Matsu traps another prisoner in her own scheme, the woman turns into a classic ghost creature, face white and staring, broken glass firmly gripped manically in front. The acting style is broad and absurd. Policeman laugh loudly and for too long, blood is an artificial kind of red, gloopy like paint, and pantomimeish grotesquery is everywhere. Ito’s backgrounds are expressionist rather than realist but always perfectly pitched.

You can tell a lot about a place from the way it treats its prisoners and when its as bad as this, you start to wonder which side of the bars you’re really on. The guards are only a representation of a consistently exploitative society, but they can at least be outsmarted. “To be deceived is a woman’s crime”, says Matsu, but it’s one she fully intends to atone for – in blood, settling not just her own score but those of all her fellow prisoners caught in the patriarchal trap of hollow promises and abused honour.

Original trailer (English subtitles)