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
