SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Movies are 'like dreams" critics are fond of suggesting (and I can join that guilty party). But scrutinised deeply that’s a claim hard to sustain (let alone rationalise), and anyway, it can be a glib and misleading way to get a read on a film. Still, there are some pictures, like this truly bizarre piece from Japanese TV star/comic Hitoshi Matsumoto, where, on entering its screen space and facing its seeming deliberate absurdities, it’s perhaps best to exterminate all rational thought. Because for most of the time it seems like Matsumoto has; instead he’s engaged in a kind of 'image-play’ (as in word-play) freely associating across a vast sampling of pop culture references and cinematic styles.
Wrestling, parenting, food, styling, game shows, comics, religious iconography, hero-worship, domestic drama and pratfalls are playfully bounced around here in a movie that seems nothing less than one long, long gag about the inter-connected-ness of all life and matter.
Even the structure, is at first, completely mystifying. The action switches between two story strands; in one, set in bleak mountain territory somewhere in Mexico, a wrestler, Escargot Man (David Quintero), is prepping for a big bout. The other main bit of plot business has Matsumoto, dressed in kids jamas trapped in an all white room, which, as the movie progresses seems a universe unto itself. We don’t know who Matsumoto’s character is, how he got into the room, or why and it doesn’t seem to ever matter. Small, sculpture-like figures appear on the plastic-like surface of the walls in Matsumoto’s 'prison’. When he touches one the 'figure’ turns out to be a male baby’s genitalia! Ghostly cherubs appear in a swarm. They disappear. Later he discovers that the rubbery 'spigots’ of these tiny bumps are like triggers. Press one, and sushi pops out of the walls. Press another, a toothbrush appears. This cause and effect gag progresses into one set-piece of slap stick after another in scenes that have the frustrating shape of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. After pushing a 'button’ doors suddenly appear in the walls as if by magic; Matsumoto’s 'Jama Man’ races to escape, only the portal close up on him.
The direction and style echoes the narrative’s 'channel-switcher’ architecture; The Mexican sequences are delivered in a harsh no-frills 'indie-style’ of deliberately under-polished camera work, while the scenes of Matsumoto in his white room are a paint-box of cultural allusions; at times Jama Man seems to inhabit a space that’s like post-modern art installation. At others, the visual ambience is sci-fi like, but mostly it looks like a kids’ playpen, designed by Terry Gilliam.
Of course, Matsumoto’s narrative scheme does make some kind of sense. The parallel action between the Mexican storyline and the white room suggests that in some way these two plots intersect, and they do in a bizarre comic book way, that’s well, cosmic. In his way Matsumoto pays a tribute to 2001. And if your mind runs to such things there’s an ingenious gag embedded in that reference too. Charming.
