Shinya Tsukamoto has always been a relatively challenging filmmaker. His 1988 film Tetsuo: The Iron Man was an enormous cult hit in English-speaking markets, with a well-earned reputation for its combination of low-tech imagery, graphic horror and striking fantasy. A Snake of June, released back in 2002, is not as violently subversive as his most famous film, but it is vastly more coherent as a result. It is one of the more difficult and thought-provoking
films you’re likely to see.

Stage actress Asuka Kurosawa plays Rinko, a suicide hotline operator who lives in what appears to be a fairly cold and passionless marriage. Her husband Shigehiko (Yuji Kotari) is a portly balding man with an obsession for cleanliness. Rinko receives a package of photographs in the mail, secretly taken, that depict her masturbating. She is also mailed a mobile telephone, and the voice of the man who calls her on it promises he will return all the
photographic negatives if she complies with his increasingly disturbed instructions.

Far from being erotic in any way, Rinko’s ordeal is highly disturbing to watch. It’s an unpleasant sexual trauma, played out in a predatory fashion over the film’s first 30 minutes. While not particularly graphic, it remains invasive and horrifying. Tsukamoto has constructed it, via performance, cinematography and script, to pierce the skin and slide under it. It is effective but deeply unpleasant.

The film boasts a gorgeous stark appearance, shot in black and white but tinted a cold blue colour in post-production. The film is set during Japan’s rainy season, and the constant downpour of water (and the blue tinting of the entire movie) gives the whole piece a soaked, seedy aesthetic. Asuka Kurosawa delivers a bold performance out of very challenging material. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival – one of the jurors that year was French director Catherine Breillat, who actively campaigned for the movie to be rewarded in this fashion. That doesn’t strike me as a surprise: A Snake of June follows similarly confronting territory of women, sex and power to Breillat’s own films such as Romance and The Anatomy of Hell.

One is sometimes forced to question films of this nature, where they feel less like something to be entertained by and more that they are something that must be endured. Ultimately I think films such as A Snake of June succeed for cathartic reasons: it’s a safe way for viewers to experience dark territories in relative comfort and safety. This is a disturbing film, and often-times an unlikeable one, but it is written and directed with integrity and talent, and stays in
the mind long after the credits have rolled.