TIFF ’13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

Whydontyouplayinhell_03

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things,
elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge
double-bill of Bastards
and Prisoners, Raya
Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line,
commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an
abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal
and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the
relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards
Alex Ross Perry’s self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono’s by turns
delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its
energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might
one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years
later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their
grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming
for one of the mobster’s jailed wives.

Sono’s
conviction in delivering that lunatic premise with a straight face is as
impressive as his eye for high kitsch, never finer than in his astonishing
image of a bare-footed child sliding across a blood-splashed floor to the
gangster on the other end, who’s then rendered captive to her performance of a
toothpaste commercial jingle and its accompanying dance, right out of the Michigan
J. Frog playbook. Sono is so pleased with his set-piece–who wouldn’t be?–that
he goes on to replay it a half-dozen more times, justifying its repetition on
account of the now-lovestruck gangster’s fixation on finding the girl–the
daughter of his rival–as an adult. That’s a fine excuse, but it doesn’t extend
to the overall air of self-enchantment that hangs over the project, which too
often rewards us for sharing its concerns about the closure of local movie
theatres, the lost art of projection, and the limitations of digital–all easy
identification points for cinephiles who like to see movies that make them feel
understood. As a savvy genre farce, though, this is as about as good as it
gets, a bloody but ultimately sweet little essay on how history repeats
itself first as tragedy, then as someone’s shoddy crime thriller.

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