Riaru onigokko
Director: Shion Sono
Writer: Shion Sono
Based on: Yusuke Yamada’s novel
Cast: Reina Triendl, Mariko Shinoda, Erina Mano, Sayaka Isoyama
Part of: /slash Filmfestival
Seen on: 26.9.2015

Plot:
Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) is on the school bus heading for an excursion. Everyone is excited about the day, but then – just as Mitsuko ducks to pick up her pen, something hits the bus, tears its top off and slices everybody in half. In a panic Mitsuko starts to run and doesn’t stop until she ends up in a parallel world where everybody seems to know her. She even has a best friend in Aki (Mariko Shinoda), only that Mitsuko can remember nothing about that world. In any case it seems like the chase isn’t quite over yet.

Even for a Shion Sono movie, Tag was very weird. But although I’m still hazy about the particulars of the story and it might not make much sense at all, I did enjoy it a whole lot and I wasn’t bored or asleep for a second, even though the screening started at 3am.

[SPOILERS]

It turns out that Mitsuko is the protagonist/playable character in a computer game. At the end of the film she manages to leave the digital world and finds her creator who immediately wants to sell her off for sex. Or maybe that’s the bonus level for players of the game who made it through and Mitsuko’s self-awareness may or may not be programmed and part of the deal.

I don’t know if Shion Sono intended his film to be feminist. But it is definitely interesting in that respect: Mitsuko’s world is completely female. Everybody she interacts with, everybody you can see in the background – they’re all women (with the exception of a literally pig-headed groom Mitsuko finds herself engaged with). And as soon as Mitsuko makes her way outside (or what appears to be outside of the game), everybody but her is male. Women are relegated to dolls on display. That means that women literally become objects men can control and play with and Mitsuko, in the end, gets to rebel against that.

There’s also the distinctly homoerotic vibe of Mitsuko’s relationship with Aki (who gets to follow her through the worlds from the second world on) that is, untypically for a Japanese film, never played for the male gaze. Generally the scenes with the group of friends in the second world were so cute and sweet, I wouldn’t have minded if that had been the entire film.

There are some inconsistencies in the film. From a point of view of computer games, I find it unlikely that the first level would be so different from the other levels. And at the end things just got too confusing to make much sense of them, at least at first viewing, when Mitsuko arrives (or does she?) in the real world. But I found these inconsistencies added to the film’s intrigue rather than to take away from it. Maybe I’ll just have to watch it again.

Summarizing: Great.