Maybe no director is quite as “pro-porno” as the prolific cult Japanese film-maker Sion Sono, but here he is again, with a movie that sports with sex and repression, sensuality and hypocrisy, reality and fantasy, porn and more porn. Sometimes this fiercely cartoony film has satire and surrealism, some ideas about how porn is a theatre of unhappiness or how sex can cauterise painful emotions. But quite a lot of the time it’s a question of having your porn cake and eating it. Kyoko (Ami Tomite) is a beautiful, fashionable young conceptual artist and novelist, evidently living a life of glorious sexual abandon, flouncing naked around her apartment. She humiliates her personal assistant. And then – cut! It’s all just a porny movie she’s in. And she gets humiliated the way she humiliates this other woman in fiction. Or … is the director yelling abuse at her a projection of her own self-hate, her own suspicion that she’s a fraud? Dreamlike memories cut in, revealing her teen loathing of her father and stepmother, her hysterical disgust at their sex life, and her own virginity, and the fact that her talented, sensitive sister died. How exactly? It’s not clear. Antiporno has a kind of energy, but is also shallow and frantic.
