Kritiken

Transgressive, unclassifiable, ridiculous—all these words apply to R100. But upon reflection, it becomes clear that Matsumoto has achieved something remarkable here: He’s made a film at once boundary-defying and really fun to watch.

Takafumi’s plight can be viewed through multiple subtexts: the ongoing Japanese recession, that country’s culture of conformity... and Japanese filmmakers’ penchant for the outrageous, both cinematically and sexually. It can even be watched as a (seriously bent) straight comedy.

There's not really any deep, substantive connective tissue between "Dead Ringers," a truly great film, and the far lesser "R100," which, with its flat, presumably intentionally dingy gray look, can be hard on the eyes. What connects the two movies is misogyny, but while "Dead Ringers" investigates the contempt for women, "R100" ends up embracing it with a big, goofy smile.

Matsumoto works overtime to keep this vital once the basic premise has been established, but the cultural subtext is so potent that he really can’t go wrong.

“R100" is also a film within a film, directed by a 100-year-old director and meant for 100-year-old viewers. An exasperated studio committee pokes at its glaring plot holes in smoking breaks during the screening of a rough cut. “R100" director and co-writer Hitoshi Matsumoto’s 100-year-old surrogate likewise reaches that state of euphoria at the sight of the fruits of his labor, although we viewers might only find it moderately amusing.

R100 doesn’t have very many contemporary precedents; it relates to reality as loosely as any Takashi Miike joint, yet Matsumoto doesn’t aim for grotesque violence as much as surrealism.

As with Matsumoto’s previous films, Big Man Japan and Symbol, R100 exists in a genre netherworld, perched somewhere between slapstick comedy, raw pulp, and experimental art-film. The humor wears thin, because there’s only so many times that watching an ordinary schmoe get the crap kicked out of him is funny.

if you're willing to look past all thematic shallowness and calculated strangeness, there's unlikely grace in Matsumoto's endless flow of riotous ideas. Once liberated of the need for justification or significance, his set pieces follow their own insane, unstoppable logic, with each new twist yielding its own outré surprises, whether a disturbing talent for mimicry, an unlikely eulogy to a fallen comrade, or the sudden entrance of an English-speaking high priestess of pain.

Though it's not as elegant as his 2009 film Symbol – or as satisfying, especially if you make the mistake of expecting a statement about gender – it's unmistakably a product of the same unique imagination.

Thankfully, the tone of Matsumoto's film verges more on the comical than the dramatic, relieving the audience from what would otherwise be an unbearably cheerless story. A thoughtful balance between wacky provocations and sociological precision, between outrageous invention and rational observation, is maintained.

Alas, Matsumoto ends up tipping the meta scale a touch too hard with intermittent scenes of censors screening a movie called “R100,” directed by a century-old man in a long white beard. Eventually the film runs out of satiric steam altogether, resorting to a lame war-movie climax with Bondage’s seven-foot tall CEO (Lindsay Hayward) as a cross between a distaff Bond villain and a Third Reich heavy.

As the intensity and strangeness of the dominatrix visits escalate, R100 achieves a giddy, absurd comedy that is truly unique. In addition, the breaks in the action provided by the censorship committee bring to mind Godard's joyful tactic of pointing out the cinematic apparatus... R100 is definitely not be for everyone, but for that segment of the audience who are on board with Matsumoto, the film will be a lot of fun.