R100 (2013 - Japanese)

Studio:       Warner Bros. Pictures
Director:    Hitoshi Matsumoto
Writer:       Hitoshi Matsumoto
Producer:  Akihiko Okamoto
Stars:     Nao Omori, Mao Daichi, Shinobu Terajima, Hairi Katagiri, Ai Tominaga, Eriko Sato, Naomi Watanabe, Gin Maeda, You, Haruki Nishimoto, Suzuki Matsuo, Atsuro Watabe, Lindsay Hayward

Review Score:

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Summary:

An average family man signs an unbreakable commitment to an S&M club that sends mistresses to dominate him at random moments in everyday life.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

With his wife Setsuko confined to a vegetative state at Jonan University Hospital, unassuming salesman Takafumi Katayama raises his son Arashi with occasional help from his father-in-law. After being beaten by a dominatrix and becoming aroused by the thrill of the experience, Takafumi joins an exclusive and secretive S&M club called Bondage. Bondage requires Takafumi to commit to a one-year contract that cannot be cancelled and he will be surprised by various mistresses at random throughout his everyday life.

The first mistress appears while Takafumi dines alone at a sushi restaurant. The woman smashes each piece of fish with her fist as it is served and Takafumi eats it. Another mistress drowns Takafumi in a public fountain. The surprise encounters continue until a mistress assaults Takafumi in the men’s room at work.

A fourth wall breaking side plot is introduced where five people screen the R100 movie and puzzle over its bizarre meaning. They eventually learn that a 100-year-old man directed the film and he claims that only other centenarians can fully understand it.

In the department store where he works, Takafumi shows a bed to an interested customer. The customer turns out to be a secret government agent who warns Takafumi that the Bondage club is dangerous and he needs to escape. The agent then vanishes mysteriously. When he returns home, Takafumi discovers that his son was given a statue of a hogtied man by one of the mistresses. Takafumi begs his contact at Bondage to release him from his contract, but the other man refuses.

Takafumi goes for his daily visit to the hospital and is accosted by the Queen of Voices, who is able to impersonate Takafumi’s wife. Takafumi seeks help from the police, but his claims are dismissed because he is willingly participating in an S&M game.

Takafumi returns home where he is bound, gagged, and whipped by the Queen of Voices. When Arashi interrupts, she binds and gags him, too. The Queen of Saliva arrives and takes over for the Queen of Voices. While going through her spitting routine with Takafumi, the Queen of Saliva breaks the upstairs railing and dies after hitting the floor below.

Bondage calls Takafumi and blames him for the death. Takafumi learns that the club had been monitoring him through a camera hidden in the statue given to Arashi.

Takafumi escapes with Arashi in his car, but they are run off the road by two masked women in another vehicle. The mystery man Takafumi met earlier arrives. He promises to take care of Arashi and gives his motorcycle to Takafumi with the instruction that he needs to rescue his father-in-law. The mystery man goes to the hospital and discovers the Queen of Gobbling eating Takafumi’s comatose wife. Meanwhile, the CEO of Bondage arrives to deal with Takafumi personally.

Takafumi arrives at his father-in-law’s house, but not before the old man is swallowed by the Queen of Gobbling. Takafumi shoots and kills her as well as the Queen of Voices. The CEO arrives with an army of minions and Takafumi dispatches them with grenades. As the last woman standing, the CEO captures Takafumi and takes him into a shed for punishment.

After Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” plays over a montage, the manager from Bondage narrates that Takafumi transitioned from masochist to sadist. Having submitted to a superior sadist, they in turn conceived another sadist. Takafumi is then seen as a pregnant man posing for pictures with his son Arashi. After the credits, the quintet outside the R100 screening room is seen again, looking flummoxed.

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Review:

If a film by David Lynch mated with a movie from John Waters, and that offspring tried morphing into a Farrelly Brothers comedy as though envisioned by Terry Gilliam, yet using the cinematic language of Stanley Kubrick, the result might look something like Hitoshi Matsumoto’s “R100.”  If that metaphor makes no sense at all, don’t worry.  Neither does “R100.”  Although if that introduction is decipherable enough to arouse a curious smile, you are better suited to knowing which side you will fall on when the movie inevitably divides those turned on from those turned off by its unrivaled brand of unique black humor.

The brilliance of “R100,” if that word can be used to describe the film, is that it ramps up the bizarre meter so slowly that the audience never consciously realizes how subtly they were sucked into an uncertain absurdist unreality.  One of the few things I know for sure is that I used the word “if” in four of the previous five sentences.  That many qualifiers are unavoidable in order to accurately assess something so firmly entrenched in “for acquired tastes only” territory.

Takafumi has as average a life as average lives get.  A tie around his neck and a briefcase in one hand, the Japanese Everyman works as a department store salesman, visits his coma patient wife daily, and tends to his young son while otherwise never risking any activity that might upset his unassuming apple cart.

After having his ass literally kicked by a leather-clad dominatrix, Takafumi discovers a taste for the submissive side of the S&M fetish scene.  Tantalized, titillated, and hungry for thrills, he signs a one-year contract with a club called Bondage to receive random beatings from a variety of mistresses poised to strike when he least expects it.

When one of the lethal ladies arrives unannounced at a sushi bar to flatten his fish with her fist, things are just fine.  But things start going too far once the vinyl outfits and riding crops show up in the men’s room at work.  All bets are definitely off when Takafumi’s young son ends up hogtied with a ball gag in his own mouth and Takafumi decides to take matters into his own hands.  Too bad he forgot that the first rule of Bondage Club, and the only rule for that matter, is that no one leaves Bondage Club.

What starts as an alluringly kinky sex fantasy filtered through a Chuck Palahniuk sieve of disturbing darkness from a Hell’s Kitchen alleyway melts first into farcical satire and then into live-action cartoon.  The story is about extreme fantasy overtaking real life and the movie mirrors that same arc with its increasingly loopy presentation.

Tethered initially to a seedy side of recognizable reality, the circumstances surrounding Takafumi’s unusual predicament spiral into such an orbit of oddity that Act One and Act Three look and feel as if they come from separate movies.  Yet “R100” is a masterwork of cinematic deceit with how mischievously writer/director Hitoshi Matsumoto hides the transformation behind steady-handed staging that is just as sincere whether depicting a mundane furniture-shopping family, the mistress Queen of Gobbling swallowing a victim whole, or a ninja woman exploding in a grenade blast to the tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.

As if his movie cannot progress any further back into the left field it came from, Matsumoto breaks the fourth wall to publicly acknowledge the mental instability of his own movie’s personality.  A self-aware side plot involving a focus group screening the same film verbally echoes identical sentiments of strangely delighted confusion running through the viewer’s mind.  Matsumoto is in effect granting permission to stop questioning the madness and to start basking in the gloriousness of the insanity.

“R100” is a play on the Japanese film rating format.  The version of “R100” screening within “R100” is directed by a centenarian who claims that only fellow 100-year-olds can fully understand his film.  I look forward to putting that notion to the test on my birthday in 2075.  For now, more important than understanding the movie’s meaning, if there even is one, is understanding that it is fun, funny, and immensely entertaining, even if it doesn’t make a lick of logical sense.

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score:  75

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