Hitoshi Matsumoto’s SYMBOL is a thrillingly bizarre cinematic experience
SYMBOL (Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2009)
New York Asian Film Festival
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, July 4, 1:00
Wednesday, July 7, 3:40
Series continues through July 8
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinema.com
Hitoshi Matsumoto’s SYMBOL is a mega-weird existential mind trip that would make Michel Gondry proud. The less you know going in, the better, so if you’re in the mood for a unique cinematic experience that constantly leads to more questions than answers, a brain warp that is part live-action video game, part investigation of humanity’s very existence, then hustle over to Lincoln Center to catch one of the best, and strangest, movies at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.
If you need to know more before buying tickets, well, we’ll do our best to try to decipher the madness. The bizarre Japanese flick spends most of its time following two very different narratives that appear to have nothing to do with each other. In Mexico, a young boy prepares to watch his father, a masked wrestler known as Escargot Man, participate in an important match. Meanwhile, a Japanese man (director Hitoshi Matsumoto) in a Moe haircut and multicolored polka-dot pajamas finds himself trapped in an empty white room — until a multitude of cherubs appear and then disappear, leaving artistic representations of their gonads sticking out of the walls. He soon discovers that when he touches each penis, he is given a specific object, sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary, from sushi, a toothbrush, and a large vase to a rope, a key, and a door — the latter three showing up only for a very brief amount of time. Like a caveman or a child, he needs to figure out how he can use these tools to escape from his nightmare. Matsumoto (BIG MAN JAPAN), part of the immensely popular Japanese comedy duo Downtown, has created a wonderfully crazy tale that does all come together in the end — but in a completely unexpected way. The best thing to do is to just sit back and let it take you wherever it is that it’s going. Enjoy!
Following a nearly five-year absence because of drug charges, Japanese director Toshiaki Toyoda (HANGING GARDEN, 9 SOULS) resurrects his once-burgeoning film career with the fascinating, meditative, and sometimes just plain silly BLOOD OF REBIRTH. In the Middle Ages, a famed traveling masseur named Oguri (Tatsuya Nakamura) has been summoned by STD-riddled lord Daizen (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) to help cure the playboy leader’s pumpkin-sized testicles. Daizen wants Oguri to stay on in his somewhat sheltered domain, far from any other society, but Oguri prefers to remain beholden to no one. Forced to hang around a while longer, Oguri becomes enamored with virgin slave Terute (Mayuu Kusakari), whom Daizen is preparing to conquer once he is rid of his disease. When Daizen learns that Oguri wants to take Terute away, he has the masseur violently murdered — and that’s only the beginning of the movie, which is centered around a sacred resurrection spring that legend says can bring people back to life. There’s also a watermelon-devouring St. Peter-like figure, an odd little person struggling to drag Oguri’s ghost body to the next life, and a wild, percussion-heavy progressive psychedelic acid rock soundtrack by Twin Tail, which features Nakamura on drums and for whom Toyoda creates the visuals for their live shows. Forget some of the clichéd characterizations and subplots and instead let the overall mood of the film carry you through some very beautiful, existential scenes, leading to one helluva different kind of one-on-one battle. Toyoda will introduce both screenings, followed by Q&A sessions.
