Esshâ-dôri no akai posuto

The young cult director Tadashi Kobayashi summons a casting open to beginners to film his film Mask, where the filmmaker sets out to recover the "indie" spirit of his early days. The film alternates the numerous auditions with glimpses of the previous stories of the contestants, mostly very young girls with no acting experience. The title refers to the red mailbox where the applicants deposit the application to be admitted to the casting RPOES is one of those movies that is hard to settle into but once you do, you want them to never end. It cost me because their universe is very oriental, in this case Japanese: formality, shouting, bows, sudden reactions, permanent overflow, as if they were characters from Sailor Moon ... but that end up fascinating us.

The film is a huge choral comedy where after each casting sequence, in which we see the same scene always played in a loop but with different applicants, the action goes back to the previous circumstances of each applicant, which leads to repeated changes of point of view and overlaps even for the same scenes. The characters are countless and several times they act in a group (like the hilarious fan club or the hilarious extras). Then the production team, the producer, the financier, the divas, the backstage of the selection and the writing of the script, the interference enter the scene. There is no unscreened aspect of the young celebrity's pre-production movie left.

Some luminous, other stories plunge into melodrama or poetic melancholy. With a few strokes the director Sion Sono is able to paint the universe of each character.

The staging is of overwhelming virtuosity and beauty, with never free travels and sequence shots. When the scene of the filming of Mask finally arrives, ALL the characters of the film appear and the director manages to give place to all of them with a prodigious result, with a tremendous tension between the fiction and the circumstances of each one and a redoubled bet to freedom and delirium.

In short, a progressively immersive experience in the genesis of a film, in the lives of the creatures that will inhabit it and in their liberation.

Exhibited at the 35th Mar del Plata festival

I just watched this movie. And since there's a lack of reviews, I thought I'd made my attempt at it.

I'm a big Sono fan, but this movie is unlike Love Exposure, Noriko's or Guilty of Romance, which I liked very much.

On the contrary, this movie is very much bright, with it's dramatic moments, or Sono moments, but nonetheless very light hearted.

Does it have a message? That's the big question I see in each of Sono's works, and maybe that's the wrong expectation. I like to watch his movies with no more than a short paragraph long of introduction. And this movie surprised me.

The plot follows a movie in the making, and the cast is to be amateurs, so we get a glimpse on their lives leading up to the audition. Which in itself is a weird plot, but Sono manages to get you caught up in the experience, to see a part of the world of movie-making, and also the drama's of it. The question behind may be, what's at stake for each one involved?

Cant really finish up watching this number .. its just drifted and drifter more as the minutes goes by ... Am giving up and binge away to others ...

Just 2/10 stars ratings from me.

...passion for the cinema and a personal way with a remarkably characteristic is what Sion Sono offered many times. This time too.

Here you have pretty gals; cute gals; too many gals; in fact too many people appearing. In my opinion, only that converts the movie in a comedy. In this case works good due to the shots are direct not from a perspective and that is what the plot just demand.

Making a plot the other way around; making focus on the small; the "little people"; the extras; putting a bit of democracy on the way things are when producing a movie.

No doubt that many unsung people lives masked in a strict society like Japanese wanting to scream the hell out of ´em and you have a plenty of these border line type of characters here that if they did not had this opportunity, they passed as "another one"; a number.

Also that even the "extras" have or could have an interesting life or something to say. This film reflects this sentiment and to be "part of"; be "into"; you know, in Japan is very important "the whole".

Other important factor that Sono is showing is that sometimes the real "thang" is not just follow the story board and let the camera roll or improvise (if you have quality actors) to dig for the better; to try to find the mother load.

Last scene says that we live into limits; not bad (serve as a net for most and to live in a civilized way) but not good enough for many intelligent and creative people.

-Classical music and some nods like the "fanatic sect" reminded me of other directors like Kubrick.

Is not a complicated film or dramatic one but holds several interesting, demanding and good point of views in a comedy key.

Good clean fun.

I should say I feel broken now. Somehow, I've expected a little more from Sono judging by the Letterboxd hysteria. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't deliver. Red post is focused upon a Mikiesque situation when a bunch of people stumble upon an audition, and that's pretty much it. There's not as much as comedic absurdist poetry with some mood swings. If you're expecting much from this movie, please re-orient, that's not the oriental Sono I love. I should praise the camera though, it is movie, after all. Getting from Utsushimi to Hazard to Love Exposure to that, well, sometimes it clicks, but just 3 times in 10. Same thing with Sono's movies, though, was that the point.