Suicide Club

Suicide Club is very close to what my idea of a Japanese movie is (or just the vastly superior Battle Royale): creative and gratuitous violence, truckloads of lurid magenta blood splashing everywhere, disturbed pre-pubescent teens doing freaky things, and an ultimate indictment on the mind-numbing, soul-deafening modern Japanese society. Who would expect anything less from Sion Sono, a noted gay porn director in Japan who also dabbles in experimental poetry and wears a fedora everywhere? Japanese culture is especially foreign to me, and not just because its citizens are so repressed that they seek to express themselves in perverse sexual forms in anime/manga and twisted blood-soaked orgies in their movies. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, driven by pressure and overinflated ideas of honor and pride.

Suicide Club begins with fifty-four school girls cheerfully skipping to the edge of a train platform, hopping down onto the tracks, and rendering the train station into a bloody 3D painting a la Pollock style. The local authorities are disturbed but not really concerned until more people jump off of roofs, hang themselves, and self-mutilate themselves in brutal ways that will not be described here. As dense middle-aged men lacking self-awareness and even less awareness for others, the cops are fighting a losing battle against a nameless force that persuades people to give up their mortal bodies for something much more important.

Sion Sono seeks to point the finger at pop-culture and the alienation of people through a pop band (irony!) of little twelve year-old girls. I'm told that these bands are popular in Japan (a bit disturbing for people not familiar with Japanese culture). There are certainly profound points in the movie where children give surprisingly lucid and deep monologues about isolation and self-worth, but the rest is slightly jumbled. The movie runs semi-smoothly and gets its message across if you're looking for it, but the direction is certainly not as clean or compact as in Battle Royale. As a mystery, the premise was obvious from the beginning. As a cult classic, watch it at your own peril.