Shot in 1995 and edited in 2012, Bad Film is, as the title suggests, a Bad film, at least in a technical sense. Sono, now an accomplished professional filmmaker, can look back on this movie he shot with no budget and 90s era home camcorders and have the sense of humour to name it "Bad Film". But the truth is, Bad Film is kind of an amazing film, a mind-boggling achievement in guerrilla filmmaking, as well as a beautiful memento of Tokyo GAGAGA.
Before Sono was a filmmaker, he formed what I would loosely term a "poetry collective", that staged marches through the streets of Tokyo, shouting their angsty poetry through megaphones. The group's name, "Tokyo GAGAGA", is meant to be onomatopoeia for the sound of the screaming soul. This film appears to have been made at the height of the group's existence, as the end-credits inform us that the film was made with the co-operation of over 2000 (!!!) Tokyo GAGAGA members.
The movie aspires to be a Godfather-esque gangster epic, or at least what one might look like if you and your 2000 closest unemployed university-aged friends decided to make your own styled gangster film for the fun of it. There are warring gangs, divided along lines of ethnicity (and later by sexual orientation), and there's a lot of violence and bloodshed, but at the heart of the story is the tragic romance between a Chinese woman and a Japanese woman caught in the middle of it.
It would be extremely difficult even for a big-budget film to obtain shooting permits for such locations as the Tokyo subway, which is where the appeal of guerrilla style filmmaking comes in (that is, risking arrest to shoot in unauthorized locations). But whereas most guerrilla filmmakers would take a skeleton crew and try to avoid being noticed, what makes Bad Film so astonishing is the sheer scale of the stunts they pull off in well-known locations. The movie opens with a huge clash between gangs on a packed train car on the Chuo line, and perhaps the most impressive scene takes place on the Shibuya scramble, with the participation of probably hundreds of extras who split up and run down various alleys when we finally hear the police whistle.
I think what I like best of all though, are the scenes that are spontaneously light and playful, such as when the gangsters run past a building and notice an aerobics class going on inside, stop, and start doing this crazy dance in imitation of the people inside. Another scene has them playing with their unloaded guns like children, having a pretend shootout. It's moments like these that not only makes you like the characters, and gives weight to the tragedy of their needless bigotry ending in bloodshed, but these are also the scenes that make me think: they were having soo much fun making this film! What I wouldn't give to have been a Japanese teenager/friend of Sion Sono in the 1990s!
Sion Sono made two other films kind of similar to this: his feature debut titled "A Man's Flower Road" (1987) and its followup "Decisive Match! Boys Dorm vs. Girls Dorm" (1988). Both have the same kind of chaotic amateur energy as Bad Film, but both are way messier, and that's saying something because Bad Film is all over the place, and almost 3 hours long to boot. Bad Film, if I have my timeline right, was made after two experiments in comparative cinematic coherence (Bicycle Sighs and The Room), and I think of it as Sono going back for a third, much more successfully realized attempt, at whatever those first two films were... Unrestrained Tokyo GAGAGA cinema, inviting the collaboration of as many members as possible.
Bad Film also benefits from being edited and finished (and narrated!) by 2012 Sion Sono. With over 150 hours of footage shot, had this film been completed in 1995 I can't imagine it would even be the same film. 2012 Sono's brilliant editing and music choices make this feel almost like a modern Sono film. Sono, I should also mention, plays one of the main gangsters ("a closeted homosexual!", 2012 Sono hilariously explains). There's a lot that's fun about this film, but as a huge admirer of Sion Sono and his art, the biggest appeal of Bad Film for me is getting a small window into Sono's past pre-professional life. When, penniless and rejecting society, he managed to form a giant almost commune around himself, of like-minded social outcasts, and together create some kind of transgressive art that was an expression of themselves, the likes of which a studio filmmaker could never dream of. GAGAGA! My own soul screams to be a part of it.
