Skip to main content


Sion Sono - Antiporno (2015)     

Sion Sono’s (b. 1961) sharp and refreshingly incisive Antiporno (2016) functions as a critique of the rigidly divided gender roles within Japanese society—particularly the split between public restraint (tatemae) and private, unspoken desire (honne).
In a broader context, the film can be read as a reflection of our era’s individual-centered hegemony, where nearly everything is treated as a consumable commodity: flesh and attention alike becoming forms of currency.

"My life is normal, but i´m playing this character"

 Narratively, Antiporno follows a young woman, Kyōko, who arrives at an audition for a softcore film. What initially appears as a contained and controlled situation—an encounter with a female artist-director and her assistant—quickly transforms into a shifting game of power, domination, and role reversal. As the film progresses, its seemingly realistic premise begins to unravel, revealing itself as a film-within-a-film and moving decisively into the unstable territory between fiction, performance, and reality.

The film’s ingenuity lies in the way it dismantles the structures of fact and fiction, deliberately blurring their boundaries while persistently interrogating the dynamics of power. European resonances are unmistakable, ranging from the theatrical tension of Harold Pinter to the reflexive cinema of Jean-Luc Godard.

While Antiporno explores the contrast between closed and open roles, it ultimately exposes the underlying condition of our present moment—one defined by the turbocharged pursuit of pleasure. Brands constantly seek new narratives of themselves, while the endless flow of images becomes a form of perpetual representation rather than reflection.

Antiporno is polemical without becoming overly solemn, philosophical without turning conceptually rigid. It resembles a loaded weapon—if one allows for a somewhat clumsy Beatles reference—and when it hits its mark, the impact is anything but subtle.

"Deceived by freedom, they praise freedom of speech but none of them can master it"

 Visually and thematically, Antiporno functions as a fresco of late-modern life: its surface-level excess, its existential emptiness, and its state of idle acceleration. On the level of language, the film challenges ossified power relations and interrogates the gaze itself—revealing humanity’s constant fumbling, its uncertainty, and its paradoxical excess of self-contradiction.

Gaze and language expose human uncertainty in a world where nothing ever comes to a halt long enough to truly be seen. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Night Porter (1974 - Il portiere di notte)

  Liliana Cavani – The Night Porter (1974) I wondered what I could write about two people who are “strangers” to each other, yet share a common past. An ugly and horrific past. One was subordinate. The other held power. What are the odds that they would meet again—and would they even recognize each other? One way or another, in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter , they meet again. A man and a woman. Lucia, a former concentration camp prisoner, and Max, the former camp commandant. The film feels like a long, dark dream in its weightlessness— a feverish delirium trying desperately to change its nature. I couldn't help but think of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle , though in this case, there are only two protagonists. When their eyes meet at the reception desk of Hotel Zur Oper, flashbacks from the past begin to rise slowly to the surface. After the initial shock and what follows, one begins to contemplate the dynamic between Lucia and Max. They become increasingly entangled ...
Post a Comment
Read more
  Thelma (2017), dir. Joachim Trier The Norwegian film Thelma , directed by Joachim Trier and co-written with Eskil Vogt, is nearly flawless in every aspect. It succeeds where many others in its genre falter. First and foremost, the film plunges into the subconscious with such force that I found myself reaching for a few volumes of Jung from my bookshelf. Thelma (Eili Harboe) moves away from her parents’ home in a small town to study biology in Oslo. She befriends a few fellow students, but one in particular, Anja (Kaya Wilkins), catches her attention. As Thelma begins experiencing epileptic seizures and ominous black birds hurl themselves at windows, things take a strange and gripping turn. When the friendship between the girls becomes something deeper, Thelma’s rigid Christian upbringing can’t handle it without resistance. Although the film’s thematic thread is fairly clear—essentially a coming-of-age story—Trier layers it with family drama, tragedy, and the paranormal. One ca...
Post a Comment
Read more
The Assessment (2024)     When a film presents two worlds—an old one and a new one—it inevitably brings to mind George Orwell, and why not Aldous Huxley as well? The Assessment (2024) is not, however, an Orwellian dystopia, although it certainly is a dystopian portrayal—one that is multi-layered, sharp, and refreshing. Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are a couple living in the controlled reality of the new world, and they wish to adopt a child. The setup seems fine—at least, on the surface. Technology has certainly taken the upper hand over the old world. The foreboding begins when the official Virginia (Alicia Vikander) arrives to assess the couple’s suitability as parents. The tone of the film is tense, at times unsettling, with Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch's brilliant film score subtly floating in the background, enhancing the atmosphere of instability. The visual quality is impressive and polished, and the casting is spot on. Above all, Alicia Vikander’s p...
Post a Comment
Read more