By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
7 Minutes Of Sion Sono’s Venice Competition Tsunami Story, HIMIZU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhSoDJ-8aTU&feature=player_embedded
In competition at Venice. Writes THR’s Deborah Young: “Director Sono Sion had already written his adaptation of the 2001 manga… ‘Himizu,’ a shrill teenage wail of existential discomfort, when on March 11 an earthquake and tsunami devastated northern Japan. His intuition to rewrite it in light of those tragic events brings poignant meaning to a nearly unwatchable adaptation of a genre comic targeted at Japanese teens. This bizarre overlay of styles and moods is a daring gamble that somehow heightens understanding of Japan’s disaster, as though the only possible aesthetic approach was via cinema of the absurd.” Oliver Lyttelton‘s angry Royal notice at indieWIRE: “We’re not going to beat around the bush here. We hated the experience of watching the vast majority of Himizu. Hated it. If we weren’t reviewing it, we might have walked out (as plenty did). Much of the film is played at a ludicrously high pitch, with most of the dialogue shouted or screeched, the first half of the film consists principally of the… characters receiving… beatings (and never fighting back), set against near-unrelenting rain, the tone wavers in a second from grim desperation to slapstick comedy, and the music mostly consists of classical pieces of crashing obviousness—Barber‘s ;Adagio For Strings’ features prominently more than once (although, in fairness, it may have been a temp score, given Sono’s turnover on the project)…”