A Snake of June (2002)

While I enjoyed the two movies by Tsukamoto I have seen outside the Tetsuo films (Gemini and Nightmare Detective) I was disappointed by their lack of extremism and shocking content. A Snake of June, however, had everything I could possibly hope for. A lot of comparisons have been made between Tsukamoto and Lynch, but unlike the latter Tsukamoto never totally left behind the rough and tumble stylistics of his early movies, and that is very much apparent here. The story takes place during Japan's rainy season, and Rinku, a suicide hotline counselor married to a droll and boring older man begins receiving photographs in the mail picturing her in sexually explicit situations. Her stalker orders her to drop her panties, don a short skirt, and go for a walk in public so that she may free her true self. But then things take an unexpected turn. Through these blatantly illegal acts of voyeurism, sadism, blackmail, and sexual harassment, the characters begin to free themselves from their vacuous bourgeois lifestyles. And then halfway through the movie goes off the rails into something very, very, very bizarre. Here is a taste: it involves a sentient metal phallus. Tsukamoto is a daring artist unafraid to explore the disturbing, but his work never comes off as exploitative. Beneath all of the shocking content are concrete moral statements about the nature of our first world society. A powerful and uncompromising work.