Snakes and Earrings

A young woman's quest for a forked tongue leads to a dangerous love triangle where pain is associated with pleasure, sex is meted out with violence and the desire to possess another culminates in murder. Director Ninagawa Yukio's film version of Kanehara Hitomi's Hebi ni Piasu is a faithful adaptation of the book which won its young author the Akutagawa Prize for literature in 2003, but there's just not enough  material in a  novella about the existential plight of an overindulgent teen  to make for a compelling movie.

Saw this movie approximately a month ago and picked up the book not long after that-- not that I was particularly interested in the book, I distinctly remember passing it up a year or two ago, but then I decided to read it anyway  in hopes of gaining more insight on the story and doing a better review. Turns out reading the book was wholly unnecessary because what you see in the movie is pretty much all there is. The book is grossly overrated, in the same way that I think Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby is undeserving of its international success. If you're the type who's new to this kind of literature then I guess Snakes and Earrings can also shock and impress, but my vote still goes to Kirino Natsuo. 

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Nineteen year-old Lui (Yoshitaka Yuriko) is beautiful, bored and listless. Wandering around the streets of Tokyo at night, she gets invited by a foreigner to step into a club where she meets a heavily pierced and tattooed punk named Ama (Kora Kengo), who shows her his forked tongue. Finding herself inexplicably fascinated with the idea of having a serpentine tongue, Lui spends the night with Ama and immediately moves in with him after resolving to have her own tongue split to match his. Ama introduces Lui to Shiba (ARATA), a tattoo artist and a piercing professional, to get her started on the process by having her tongue pierced.

Not satisfied with just getting a 14g stud clamped in her tongue, Lui decides to push herself further by getting a dragon and a kirin tattooed on her back. She commissions Shiba to design it for her and pays for his services through sexual favors. She carries on an affair with Shiba whilst continuing to come home to Ama, all the while being bored and unhappy with the "normal" life she's been leading. Caught in a whirlwind of angst and despair, Lui  finds herself unable to choose between a man who claims to love her enough to kill for her and one who claims to be so enamored as to be tempted to put an end to her, that is, until one act of violence  becomes the deciding factor in the said stalemate...

Set in contemporary Japan, Snakes and Earrings offers a bleak and trite view of the world as seen through the eyes of a wayward teen, as she immerses herself in what she perceives to be a dark and intriguing subculture. It's a movie that touches on a number topics such as body modification, sado-masochism, possession and nihilism but fails to fully explore any one of these themes, particularly because the main character's sense of aimlessness prevails over everything in it. There's a certain affectation to its narration, the pacing is slow and the turn of events inconsequential; this is one film that banks on showcasing an alternative lifestyle, both for its novelty and its ability to shock those who abide by the norm, the drawback to this is that because there's little or no explanation of its characters' motivations, its alleged honest and brutal depiction of today's times comes off more as an artifice than an actual reflection of the problems that beset today's youth.

"I want to be part of an underground world where the sun doesn't shine, there are no love songs, and the sound of children's laughter is never, ever heard."

Self-absorbed and fickle, its protagonist, Lui, endeavors to become a part of Tokyo's seedy underbelly for unexplained reasons. Her slow and steady path towards self-destruction leads her to expose herself to excruciating pain and/or danger by enjoying the thrill of having casual sex with multiple partners. She's a 21st century wildchild who belongs to a new breed of rebels without a cause, one who's desperately trying to feel alive, one who's fighting the languor taking hold of her system. Reading about her exploits in a 118-paged novella is one thing, but seeing her vacuous life unfold onscreen is a whole other finicky ordeal.

The main problem with this movie is that it has a female lead that is running on empty-- she fails to garner sympathy or elicit understanding, mainly because she herself admits that she's depressed and disgruntled over nothing. There's nothing to be fixed, no solution to be found, because there's no problem to begin with. All her choices are made out of caprice; her adventures, all meaningless and pointless exercises designed to distract her from her self-imposed misery. In this regard, Snakes and Earrings is no different from any post-modern literature or cinematic feature about troubled teens or anguished adults who seem to have lost their footing. It captures the alienation and early disaffection of a new generation, offering a cocktail of sex, tattoos and alcohol in lieu of the prototypical combination of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. What makes it such a forgettable venture is that it does absolutely nothing in providing any insight as to the cause or design behind this ennui, neither does it break new ground in terms of its genre, given the sheer volume of films available on how hard it is to be a kid growing up in today's society.

Told in roman à clef by a beautiful and nubile author whose face appears in full color as an endsheet to the book, it's no surprise that this fantastical account of a person's immersion into an oft misunderstood and grossly misrepresented segment of society gained so much acclaim and attention despite its meager content. It's because people will always be drawn to the unknown, the bizarre, and Kanehara Hitomi's Snakes and Earrings offers a hefty dose of a world wherein a  person can claim to love a man without bothering to know his name, where teeth yanked out of someone's mouth is offered as a love token, and where the urge to kill is strongest during the act of intercourse. It's a fascinating and disturbing world for those who wish to witness it vicariously, unfortunately, while some choice words may prove to be adequate to describe a certain event or emotion on the written page, the same cannot be said of the material once it is brought to the big screen.

From its near silent opening where Tokyo is seen through Lui's vacant eyes to the angst-filled monologue devoid of any emotional impact, this movie makes the viewer feel more like a detached observer than a would-be confidante. The screenplay is bogged down by the hapless musings of a young woman who's offensively naked of any depth or substance-- on paper it reads like an adolescent's fatalistic tirade, one that discusses the acute feeling of helplessness that envelops her to the point of  wanting to die so as to be rid of all this suffering; on screen, what the viewer sees is an inordinate amount of moping, interrupted only by harried sex with mild bondage, followed by an incomprehensible resort to binge-drinking. Verily, what might capture the imagination or tickle one's fancy while reading the book might not have the same effect  visually because a line or two of text on an abstract concept does not necessarily translate well onscreen especially when the message or thought behind it is ambiguous and illusory.

Underwhelming as a whole and at times agonizingly insular as told from a lost child's limited perspective, director  Ninagawa Yukio's latest cinematic feature doesn't have the same emotional draw as his previous works-- it doesn't have the palpable tragedy of Waru Iemon nor the quiet complexity and  absorbing characterization of Ao no Honō. Chances are, it would probably be best remembered as the movie where Yoshitaka Yuriko artistically bared it all and yet somehow still managed to look dull and unappealing. The young actress just doesn't appear to have the range or perhaps the experience from which to make something out of this poorly written role. She puts on what most would consider a brave performance but she doesn't go beyond portraying Lui as this plastique, soulless doll. More often than not, she sounds and looks like a  spoiled and whiny brat instead of a tormented, world-weary individual. Furthermore, she's rather flat and unconvincing when it comes to the more erotic elements of the story, but then again, it's no easy feat to visually interpret the masochistic tendencies of a person who gets aroused by a needle stuck through her tongue as the book would have you believe:

"The next moment there was a clamping sound and shivers much greater than those of an orgasm shot through my entire body. Goosebumps ran up my arms and my body went into a slight spasm. My stomach tightened and for some reason so did my crotch, where I felt an ecstatic, tingling sensation."

Again, it's easier to make use of words to describe a particular sensation but bringing something like that from page to screen requires an actress to convey so much more than just drawing tears in her eyes with an expression that  looks like a half-wince-half-grin, the same goes for most of the sexual encounters in this movie. ARATA does slightly better, playing Shiba with a calm facade to mask the cruel temperament of his character. Soft-spoken and yet still menacing with delusions of being a god in his own right, he does well in balancing the severity of having a face full of piercings and a body like a canvas with his seemingly aloof and professional stance as a tattoo artist. Kora Kengo on the other hand plays Ama to dopey perfection. He's a misfit by way of looks and yet conventional in his everyday living; he's sweet and excitable, prone to violence and yet still naive when it comes to weighing the consequences of his actions. Watching the movie, it's quite clear that all three actors performed to the best of their abilities, the only catch is that none of them was ever able to rise above the shortcomings of the material that they were working with. As such, all three characters remain strangers up till the end of the movie, ultimately making this viewing experience a hollow and senseless journey. 

Categories: Japanese, Movies, Reviews, Yoshitaka Yuriko