By Thanks to R100, we know the proper recipe for a shirt: 24 hours in a slow-cooker, with red wine sauce, celery and carrots. Not because the film involves shirt eating (not directly at least), but because it forced Twitch founder/editor Todd Brown to eat his own shirt.
Before it screened at Fantastic Fest late last year, he made a bold claim, if any film was half as crazy as Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, he’d eat his shirt.
R100 called Brown’s bluff, and he made good on his promise. It’s fitting, really, because that’s exactly the kind of thing someone in R100 might be forced to do.
[This review was originally posted as part of our coverage of the 2014 New York Asian Film Festival. It is being reposted to coincide with the theatrical/VOD release.]
R100
Director: Hitoshi Matsumoto
Rating: R100
Release Date: January 23rd, 2015 (Theatrical and VOD)
Country: Japan
Takafumi Katayama (Nao Omori) is your average Joe (or whatever the Japanese equivalent to that is). He’s a reasonably competent salesman at a large furnishing store. There’s exactly nothing remarkable about him. If you saw him on the street, you wouldn’t think twice about it. Unless, of course, he was being abused by a woman in leather. And while for many that seems a bit unlikely, for Katayama it’s a daily occurance.
You see, Katayama likes pain. Sexually. And since his wife went into a coma, he has had a rather involved method of having this particular desire fulfilled. For one reason or another, he ends up at a club called “Bondage.” The literal merry-go-round that follows convinces him to hire a particularly comprehensive S&M care package. As he goes about his life, various leather-clad “Queens” will come to him and make him feel. And it’s not always physical abuse; any sort of humiliation will do. Lovely dinner at a sushi bar? Here comes a Queen to smash the food to bits and make him eat it in front of the extremely uncomfortable guests. And he loves it. You can tell, because his face contorts like a baloon, his eyes turn black, and ripples emanate from his head.
By now, you should know if R100 is your type of film. If that previous paragraph sounds either titillating or hilarious, you’ve already figured out the next screening within 50 miles of you and are planning your weekend around it. If you find that conceptually retched, literally nothing about it is going to change your mind. This is a film intended to appall. But it also wants to make you laugh. And in that objective it is overwhelmingly successful.
Right from the outset, I was completely and totally hooked. And so was everyone else. When that first Queen roundhouse kicks Katayama’s head into a glass window, it was a taste of things to come but it couldn’t prepare us. Nothing could. From there it builds and builds into this amorphous, incomprehensible blob of violent sexual comedy. And it’s absolutely brilliant.
I’m loathe to say more. Not that I’m really worried about spoilers, because R100 truly has to be seen to be believed. A whole bunch of text on the internet won’t tell you shit. I could describe the above trailer – which is really just a clip from Katayama’s introduction to his new pastime – in excrutiating detail, but until you actually saw it for yourself, you couldn’t comprehend what I’m saying. And that’s a pretty basic scene, all things considered.
Around the 45-minute mark, things get Meta. People begin to react to the film’s content and note its narrative inconsistencies. I laughed as hard as anyone, but it was also the moment that I began to think that perhaps R100 was trying just a bit too hard. Pulling off Meta humor is extremely difficult, and generally it only works when it’s a fundamental part of the narrative. That isn’t the case here; the film literally pauses for comment a few times and then resumes.
That’s an issue in part because, as funny as it is, R100 presents itself seriously. Omori and co. aren’t in on the joke, so when someone flat out states that there are massive contradictions and continuity problems, it doesn’t really jive with the narrative as presented. It seems more like an attempt to shield itself from criticism. “Hey, you can’t criticize this story for being ridiculous, because we did it first. Aren’t we zany?” Calling attention to a story’s flaws rarely works. Rather than being cutesy and playing it off, I’d rather they just fix the problem in the first place.
It still bothered me in R100, but it’s less of a problem, because the film was going to have those inconsistencies anyway. The film called attention to them because it does whatever it damn well pleases. Without those moments, nothing would have changed. And so they aren’t really flaws in the way these things usually are. They were clear, albeit insane, directorial decisions to drive forward the little bit of narrative that R100 pretends to have. They didn’t have to draw attention to them.
But in the grand scheme of things, none of that really matters. Because this is a film where a platinum-blonde giantess screams American profanities while jumping into a pool on a continuity-shattering loop.
I mean, come on. That’s fucking amazing. And if that couldn’t inspire someone to literally eat their shirt, I have no idea what could.
