Continuing his tireless output of inventive films, Hisayasu Satô's work on the cusp of the 1990s shows us an artist experimenting and growing within the Pink genre, with some surprisingly ambitious entries. Our fifth volume of this series shows the director's recurrent tropes of alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, and surveillance continuing to evolve.
In BRAIN SEX, two inquisitive young women discover a lone pirate radio DJ operating from a van. Broadcasting unofficial thoughts and opinions, the show gets increasingly complicated when the system of illicit broadcasting changes hands and takes on a covert voyeur angle. Descriptions of strangers' fetish-laden sex described over the radio take a turn after happening upon (and engaging directly with) a serial killer, and a curious exploration of motives then ensues. Manipulating the multiple layers of vicarious distance between people created through not only video surveillance but also audio broadcast, Satô continues to explore concepts including deviance, privacy, intimacy, and the media, with sweeping photography of daytime rooftops and tightly framed night scenes.
Satô deliberately rerouted the Molester's Train with his own thoughtful imprimatur on the long-lived series. Eschewing light entirely and the comedic tone common to the other entries, BIRTHDAY (aka Molester's Train: Nasty Behavior) tells the tale of a young woman so demoralized that she's bent on violent self-destruction on her twentieth birthday. However, once exposed to a serial train groper who also videotapes his work, for whom loneliness and abandonment also resonate, a fresh and revitalizing attraction begins to take root. Within this focus on two highly troubled characters, the unexpected emerges. A highly unlikely, and surprisingly tender, entry within an equally unlikely film series, we see Satô's almost otherworldly facility in shaping even a rote concept into something entirely his own.
The spare character exercise FUGA MUSIC FOR ALPHA AND BETA (aka Pervert Ward: S&M Clinic) highlights an intense and dramatic relationship between a husband and his wife, where his extreme need for sadism (and its results) takes center stage. Focusing tightly on these two characters alone makes the excessive need to push boundaries through pain and tolerance all the more unsettling. When a highly unexpected third person enters this claustrophobic space, it only serves to concentrate the effect of Satô's invasive lens, in this psychosexual exercise where bondage is hardly the scariest element at play.
