AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

saraccan I like movies that push boundaries and this one definitely does that to a certain extent. But it gets somewhat boring just when you start expecting interesting things to unfold, because it just does the classic twist after twist routine which makes it strange but in a not so good way. The movie is about a mother and daughter who are sexually abused by the father of the house, and the disorienting life of this family.

NaderaSuleiman After watching so many Sion Sono films I could not help but to notice a very similar plot being repeated in almost every film. And it is "The parent- child conflict". Almost every film has a story about a child tormented by a parent in various ways. Strange Circus without question is definitely one of those films. Strange Circus is a film about how complex, hard and restricting family bonds can be. Sion sono has always been known by how much he hates to conform, he always delves into the extremes and into taboos to bring us the troubled and disturbing emotions he wants to convey to his viewers. This is why his films are hated by many viewers, in many interviews he stated that this is what he really wants, his films to be hated. But I personally find them beyond fascinating!So here is the interpretation: As a beginning, Mom (Sayuri) and dad (Ozawa) had sex. The result was that they gave birth to Mitsuko. Who is basically half mom and half dad. Mitsuko was abused by both of them and was forced into their sex life. She became a part of it as she is part of them. Because of sex and through their sex she was both created and demised. Sayuri was reborn in Mitsuko. Mitsuko is Sayuri and sayuri is Mitsuko. Are we clear on that? I hope so... Furthermore,Mitsuko is also the novelist Taeko. Mitsuku indeed killed her mother Sayuri and took her role as her father's wife and sexual partner. She adapted to this role so much that she thought she was her mother. Now Sayuri's persona living in Mitsuko started feeling guilty for killing the persona and innocence of the real little Mitsuko. So she started believing that Mitsuko was the one being killed and Sayuri has killed her. After the recurrent abuse and neglect by her father Mitsuku killed her father as well (also by throwing him off the stairs). Trying to get rid of the guilt and as a healing process, Mitsuko created a third persona, "Taeko". Taeko is now abused and deranged and she is in constant confusion of who she really is (we have seen her walking normally, we have seen her crippled in a wheelchair, and we have seen her walking around with a wig and sunglasses looking like a complete different person). Taeko acts like a cripple because that what she always felt like (after being raped you feel like you're a torso with no legs and no arms). Taeko\Mitsuko is now a writer, and after writing her story, she comes close to realizing who she really is. Then koji comes into the picture. koji is Mitsuko's silent and reserved fan who she finds interesting and mysterious. He starts hanging out with her all the time and reads her story as she writes it. He even starts giving her ideas for alternate endings. Because Mitsuko is always in confusion and denial of her real identity, she feels like her story needed to have this balanced confusion as well. So she inserts Koji into her story as the real Mitsuko. She wants to believe that real Mitsuko never really died and that she prevailed and came back as a boy to kill both of them to end all their misery. That would have made Mitsuko happy, to have that ending. But instead, we are shown that it was all a dream and koji is just a weirdo who wants to use her to get money from the journalists by exposing her story. The final scene is of the "strange circus" in her mind where all the characters are present and watching as she gets beheaded to represent her final demise and to give an ending to her story. She is finally relieved now believing that Koji is Mitsuko and she never really died, but has been victorious the right way. The way it should have been. Like mentioned above, Sion Sono repeated the parent-child conflict plot in so many of his films, which leads to the question: Is he really just fascinated by this or has he himself been abused by a parent?? Probably yes … I believe that writing this film was a healing process for Sion Sono himself. He is really mitsuko and he is in constant struggle to not be the dad he hated. The dad we have seen in Himizu, Cold fish, Guilty of Romance and so many other of his films. We, as fans can never know how his childhood really was but I sense in all his writings he was an abused child who lived with a very restrictive father which drove him to become who he is today. He hates some things in his self that were inherited from his dad, but he can't change them because his dad made him. Sion is his father and Sion's father is Sion. They can never escape that. And that is what Strange Circus is all about.

chaos-rampant What a strange movie. It reminds me of Chan-wook Park in the way that it teeters so close to the edges of bad taste, or the trite movie conventions of melodrama, in an effort to ultimately transform them into grand gestures. So that the lowly and visceral can be ennobled, humanized into something akin to an opera.The first half hour of this is superb stuff, or really close to it. The violated mind as a vaudeville stage, to which we are literally invited by the impresario holding out a hand at a first-person camera; once inside, the reality of vicious trauma involving pedophilia, incest, and a cello case, this perversity that we usually find in Miike reflected, thus reversed (a mirror is crucial in this segment, and eventually fractured), into a nightmare world of the mind rendered with images of Cronenberg and rooms painted bloodred. This part is great because it understands the stuff of nightmares, and how the mind is a funhouse mirror that distorts the violence heaped upon it.Then the movie becomes something like an inverse Audition, about an unstable woman with a cello case full of dark secrets weaving her web and about another web being woven by her prey meant to ensnare her. She is an author writing a novel about the childhood stuff we just witnessed in the first part. The most interesting notion here is that her victim sets out to find out about her and why she writes herself in her books, what kind of self hides behind the facade.All this is marred by a pretty juvenile finale, where we are tossed about through a bunch of shocking revelations from one reality to the other, in an effort to know what 'actually' happened. Here lies the problem for me; we are told too much, too much of what was earlier a suggestion is attempted to be explained away (we even experience an earlier scene in the way that it actually happened, this tacky Fight Club device) and too much of this hinges on some unexpected twist than something that crawls underneath.Interesting movie and I will keep from it the amazing shots of the damaged mind envisioned as a neon-lit luna park, but it only reminds me again of how important it is that we have David Lynch.Having achieved the fame and exposure that he has, surprising in itself, it is perhaps easy to leave him behind in lieu of more obscure, undiscovered works such as this. But none of these can sustain and sublimate like he knows the dreamy illusion within movie structures that remain vague, mere outlines that hint at spiritual perils. He knows the stuff of nightmares but more importantly what mechanisms control them in the mind, how illusions are formed. This one has some intuitive grasp, but grasps blindly.

Gomer Pyle When i saw Suicide Club for the first time i knew Sion Sono would come to be a director i would look out for, and with Strange Circus he delivers, that's not to say that you will automatically like this one if you loved suicide club, because this is is something different.If suicide club was his pitch black pulpy look at Japanese culture, this is his nightmarish avant garde look on a dysfunctional family. This is art-house the way it should be, confrontational, engaging and intelligent.This is at some points extremely unwatchable as it deals with themes such as incest, but the way it is portrayed is absolutely stylish but still jaw droppingly tense.It reminded me of David Lynch and Alejandro Jorodowsky because of the dreamlike sequences and the constant pondering on what is real and what isn't.This movie is shot beautifully, even Kubrick came to mind at some scenes. Without spoiling anything i can say that this movie is very open to interpretation and it works and many levels.I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes deeply psychological drama, horror and art-house combined), but a warning, this is not for the faint of heart and i can really understand why people would condemn this film as perverted trash (such as people will condemn Lars Von Triers Antichrist), although i genuinely think that anyone with a love for cinema would grasp the deeper things this movie has to offer and will enjoy the beauty in this nightmarish vision.