FLOWER AND SNAKE:
FIND THE FLOWER

   The New Flower differs from the Old – the 1974 Masuru Konuma film (and its several remakes) – in many ways. Thomas and Yuko Weisser [in their book Japanese Cinema: The Sex Films] have called the Konuma movie “well-made garbage” and I can’t improve upon that. At the risk of putting words in their mouths I think that the well-made part would probably consist of technical values, fairly lively direction, the lovely and talented Naomi Tani in the lead and some pretty wacky elements of farce.
   Mokoto, our hero, holds onto his cum-stained tissues the way some folks collect the family photos, ritually burns them in the street once he finally makes it with Tani and practices his bondage-and-abuse moves on a blowup rubber doll while his way-too-doting mama makes porn films in the basement. His boss gets off on putting caterpillars up the maid’s shapely butt back in the rose garden. (Her response is pure Little Annie Fanny. Whoops! Gosh! Golly!)
   The garbage part is pretty much everything else. Suffice to say that if bad over-the-top acting – with the notable exception of Ms. Tani – an obsession with enemas, piss and scat are your cup of tea then you’re going to love the original Flower and Snake.
   Since they’re both based on Oniroku Dan’s novel the plot-lines are similar. In the old Flower, Mokoto’s boss enlists him to kidnap his haughty wife Shizuko (Tani) and “destroy her pride.” Which he eventually does, at the same time releasing him from a lifetime of Kleenex boxes and Oedipal rumination. He, of course, falls in love with her along the way but she initially rejects him. “As you wanted,” she tells both Mokoto and her husband. “I am reborn as a lustful woman.” But the finale finds her in bed with both guys though, a happy threesome ever after. Simple declarative theme and in pinku films, not a new one.. A humbled woman is one awakened to the power of her sexuality.
The New Flower dumps most of the Taming of the Shrew aspects of this and all the Mommy Dearest in favor of its basic Story of O concepts and invests them with a welcome level of complexity and sophistication – plot, character and theme-wise and in the actual movie-making – which add up to something almost...subversive.
   First, it’s visually gorgeous. The only other movie I can think of as beautiful yet cruel as this is Radley Metzger’s 1975 The Image, based on the novel by Jean de Berg (a woman actually, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, wife of new-wave novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet). Like Metzger, director Takashi Ishii hasn’t missed a trick technically. From the photography and lighting to costume and set design and score it’s a lush and stunning departure from the usual fare, filled with brilliant color. You’d think you were in a big-budget Hollywood production were it not for its....sensibilities. Which dichotomy alone undermines that good old sense of gravity.
   Add to that the presence of Aya Sugimoto as Shizuko. And I do mean presence. Sugimoto is ferociously beautiful in this role. And I don’t say that simply because I may have fallen in love with her.
   In this version Shizuko’s a world-famous tango dancer – and wether she’s dancing a waltz or tango or hanging from a crossbeam you can’t take your eyes off her. Here the boss-character is transformed to a rich and powerful ninety-five-year-old Yakuza with a lecherous yen for for the wife of a deeply indebted industrialist, willing to sell her to forgive his massive debt. He figures she’ll give the old bastard a heart attack and hell, that will be that. It’s a decision he’ll later come to regret. But in one of the DVD’s extras, actor Renji Ishibashi, who plays the old man, is asked to comment on the theme of the film. He tells his interviewer that “beauty involves endurance and pain.” He’s talking about the theme but he’s talking about Aya Sugimoto too.
   To say that she throws herself into this role is like saying Churchill was a pretty good politician. In her own interview we learn that she told her agent that for the chance to work with director Ishii you can “fry me, cook me, do whatever you want with me.” The frying and cooking aside she pretty much gets what she asked for. Instead of the simple one-on-one “training” in the first film, Shizuko is transported to a mysterious surreal arena called the Coliseum where – while the old man watches on his closed-circuit TV – for 100 million yen per show an audience of masked “intellectuals, stars and celebrities” is treated to the abuse of various captives by Yakuza henchmen. Up to and including the final abuse. In fact the first thing she sees upon arrival is a naked woman being whipped to death. From there on it gets worse.
   Under the direction of a tutu-wearing, nurse-or-schoolgirl-clad MC and to the tune of various waltzes and overtures not only is she forced to observe the murder of her husband’s employee and the electro-torture of her pretty young bodyguard, she herself is stripped, molested, hoisted onto a bamboo pole, force-fed a diuretic and then muzzle-raped fore and aft by a pair of guys wearing pig-masks until she pees, wax-and-rope tortured in various positions, spanked, dunked, groped, raped some more and finally crucified – with ropes, thankfully – on a spotlit rainsoaked center-stage Golgotha.
   And all this, according to Aya, was shot for real.
   In her interview she tells us that many scenes were incredibly painful. That in the bamboo-pole scene in particular when she’s hoisted off the ground she felt her shoulders dislocating, her fingers go numb and the blood-flow disrupted throughout her upper body. Dangling there she could only go about fifteen seconds. She was about to faint. The crew wanted to lessen her pain but director Ishii wouldn’t permit it. Ishii wanted the real thing. He yelled at her. It seems clear that they argued like hell. Finally they worked out a compromise, “tweaked the ropes and the location of them and studied them from every angle.” She figured that after that she could go, say, a minute. Ishii made her go three.
   In the press conference prior to the film’s premier author Oniroku Dan tells of visiting the set. He’s been sort of surprised all along that she even wanted the part. In Japan she’s had a respected career as a recording artist and on TV. Having warned her to no avail about Ishii’s directoral excesses he wanted to see how she was doing. He brought her a sandwich. “I got scared,” he said. “I couldn’t bear to watch. I wished her well,” he said, and fled. He said the movie still frightened him. “In fact am planning to leave right after this conference.”
   He got a lot of laughs. Especially from Aya.
   A little perspective though. By the standards of today’s internet this is pretty tame stuff. But of course by that measure so are all Japanese films, even the roughest of the roughies. I never saw a woman jerk off a horse in a Japanese movie – though one may exist and I haven’t run across it yet. Who knows. But there are hundreds of nastier clips out there in cyberspace. Worse positions. Crueler tortures. The thing is, nasty isn’t the goal here. In this case nasty, in Aya Sugimoto’s words, was simply “like purging poison from the body.”
   What they were after was eroticism.
   In particular eroticism geared toward women. “This time it’s been made for a wider female audience to enjoy,” she says.
   I heard her make this comment and thought, come on. Women are going to like this? She’s got to be kidding me. Or kidding herself.
   Turns out she isn’t.
   The second time I watched it I watched it with a woman and sexually speaking quite a normal woman at that.
   “I was struck by the way the movie focused so much visually and story-wise on her sensations,” she told me later, “her sensory and sensual experiences. In male-oriented porn there’s always that false attempt to make it seem like all the women are lovin' it for guys' viewing pleasure. But this was different. It felt like this was all her story, focused on her visceral reactions well beyond those of anyone else around her. Watching it, I felt inside her, connected to her physical point of view."
   And when Shizuko came to that do me imperative toward the end we both had this eureka moment. We both simultaneously got it.
   Here’s how it happens.
   As I said before, while Shizuko’s going through all this sweaty hell and high water at the Coliseum her industrialist husband’s having regrets. Pangs of conscience. He’s drinking way too much. Even though their sex life’s been lousy – his fault by the way – he can’t believe he’s done this to her. Somehow he scrapes up the cash and offers to buy her back. The old man’s representative and protegee tells him it’s probably not going to happen. That she’s “having so much fun” she may not wish to return to him.
   Which by this point may or may not be the case. Her torments have become more and more ritualistic, almost initiatory. Her responses to them more subdued, controlled, maybe even participatory. Clearly something is changing inside her. At one point a hint of a smile crosses her lips. And she’s already had what looks a whole lot like an orgasm during that crucifixion scene – her face gone passionate, almost ecstatic.
   According to the rep, he’ll have to come and convince her.
   He’s taken blindfolded to the Coliseum and there she is, tied to a cross-beam, being gang-raped right in front of him. It looks like she’s been there for quite a while too. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. Some masked guy rolls away from her and another guy starts in. Her husband pulls him off her and takes his place in front of her, stares into her face and softly calls her name. She hears him but she doesn’t so much as open her eyes.
   “Do me,” she says. “Just do me.”
   There are tears in his eyes. But not in hers. He begs her forgiveness. Tells her he’s bought her back from the Yakuza. Asks her if they can start all over again.
   “Do me,” she says again. And if it was not clear before it is now – this isn’t said out of resignation. It’s a demand.
   Eureka moment. In this single line is the difference between the 1974 film and the New Flower and Snake. Strikes me as a whopper
   “As you wanted. I am reborn as a lustful woman,” says Shizuko in the first film. The key phrase being, I think, as you wanted. She’s got the upper hand finally but she’s still demurely respectful of the wishes of the male.
  Aya Sugimoto’s Shizuko couldn’t give a damn what any man wants.
   It’s what she wants that counts.
   Do me is far more what a man might say than the utterance of your typical Japanese woman or any other woman for that matter under these circumstances. And that’s the point. By enduring every bit of abuse these guys can throw at her she’s managed to transcend and overcome them, indeed despite them she’s been empowered to a position well above them. She’s not only found her own sexuality as in the first film but one that’s more akin to a man’s and every bit as free and demanding. In the end she’s humbled them – not the other way around.
   If this point isn’t clear enough then, in a kind of coda the old man appears before her, rises from his wheelchair, falls, and crawls alone snakelike on his belly to where she’s bound to yet another cross lying on the floor. He sucks at her toe, licks a grotesque path all the way up her body and at her sultry invitation – “will you dance with me?” – frees her from her tethers. She mounts him and literally fucks him to death. Getting off on this every bit of the way, just as she did with her husband.
   Gotta think, that’s one lucky ninety-five-year-old Yakuza.
   His protegee enters and sees what she’s done. He pulls a pistol on her. She shoots him to death with the old man’s gun, makes a spooky escape through the building to a heli-pad rooftop where she encounters her husband a final time. In a surreal montage they dance again across the rooftop – and then she’s dancing with other men too and finally she dances alone – naked but for diamonds, gloves, and a glittering bright tiara. Queen of the Hop. Graceful, aloof, composed.

   Needless to say this kind of thing doesn’t happen much in real life – though it does mirror the trading of roles in transactional S&M, where it’s the submissive who really runs the show and not the dom. But nobody’s murdered in transactional S&M. At least not on purpose – your technique would have to be pretty sloppy. And I suspect that few folks in that scene make the kind of sea-change Shizuko makes either.
   This is fantasy. It’s not perfect, as film or as fantasy. At times the music’s a bit overbearing. The surreal ending isn’t as neat as I’ve indicated and tends somewhat toward the obscure, at least to this observer.
But who’s to say there isn’t a good-sized grain of observed truth in here as well?
Guys? Go ahead. Throw us all the shit you want. We’ll blast you out of the ballpark.
   There’s another telling moment in the press conference. Director Ishii holds the mike. Aya Sugimoto’s standing next to him and he compliments her on her bravery. She smiles sweetly and nods. “It turned out very well,” he says and looks to her for what clearly seems reassurance. Again she smiles and nods. “It was a great experience, yes?” he says – and this is directed not at the other cast members assembled there onstage but directly at her. She smiles and nods and each bows to the other. His own bow appears almost shy. And when finally he says thank you all very much the audience he addresses seems to be an afterthought.
   He bows to them only after having first bowed to her. So that you have to wonder. Between the beautiful young film star who nearly had her shoulders dislocated by the overbearing director – who exactly had, and who remains, the power here?  Click to see more photos from this film.