Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

AKA Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

Directed by
Pier Paolo Pasolini        

Writing credits
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Sergio Citti
Pupi Avati

The film is set in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy in 1944. The story is in four segments loosely parallel to Dante's Inferno: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood.

Four men of power, the Duke (Duc de Blangis), the Bishop, the Magistrate (Curval), and the President (apparently Durcet) agree to marry each other's daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several collaborator young men, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine of each sex), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function in the debauchery will be to recount erotically arousing stories for the men of power, and who, in turn, will sadistically exploit their victims.

The story depicts some of the many days at the palace, during which the four men of power devise increasingly abhorrent tortures and humiliations for their own pleasure. In the Anteinferno segment, the captures of some victims by the collaborators are shown, and, later, the four lords examining them. The Circle of Manias presents some of the stories in the first part of Sade's book, told by Mrs. Vaccari (Hélène Surgère). In the Circle of Shit, the passions escalate in intensity from mainly non-penetrative sex to coprophagia. A most infamous scene shows a young woman forced to eat the feces of the Duke; later, the other victims are presented a giant meal of human feces. The Circle of Blood starts with a black mass-like wedding between the guards and the men of power, after which the Bishop has sex with a male victim. The Bishop then leaves to examine the captives in their rooms, where they start systematically betraying each other: one girl is revealed to be hiding a photograph, two girls are shown to be having a secret sexual affair, and finally, a collaborator (Ezio Manni) and the black servant (Ines Pellegrini) are shot down after being found having sex. Toward the end, the remaining victims are murdered through methods like scalping, branding, tongue and eyes cut out as each libertine takes his turn to watch, as voyeur.

The film's final shot portrays the complacency, myopia, and desensitization of the masses: two young soldiers, who had witnessed and collaborated in all of the prior atrocities, dance a simple waltz together.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073650/

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

AKA 愛のコリーダ 完全ノーカット版 / Ai no Korīda

Director:
Nagisa Ôshima

Writer:
Nagisa Ôshima

In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe (Matsuda) is a former prostitute who works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner, Kichizo Ishida, molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments, drinking, and various other indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife and family to pursue his affair with Abe. Abe becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where Ishida finds he is most excited by being strangled during lovemaking, and he is killed in this fashion. Abe then severs his penis and writes "Sada Kichi the two of us forever" in blood on his chest.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074102/

Floating Weeds (1959)

AKA Ukigusa

Director:
Yasujirô Ozu

Writers:
Kôgo Noda
Yasujirô Ozu

The film takes place during a hot summer in 1958 at a seaside town in the Inland Sea. A troupe of travelling theatre arrives by ship, headed by the troupe's lead actor and owner, Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura). The rest of the troupe goes around the town to promote their kabuki acts.

Komajuro visits his former mistress, Oyoshi, who runs a small eatery in the town. They have a grown-up son Kiyoshi, who now works at the post office as a mail clerk and is saving up to go to the university. However, he does not know who Komajuro is, thinking he is his uncle. Komajuro invites Kiyoshi to go fishing in the sea.

When Sumiko, the lead actress of the troupe and Komajuro's current mistress, learns that Komajuro is visiting his former mistress, she becomes jealous and makes a visit to Oyoshi's eatery, where Kiyoshi and Komajuro are playing a game of go. Komajuro chases her away before she can say anything destructive, then confronts her in the pouring rain. He tells her to get off her back from her son, and decides to break up with her. Sumiko calls Komajuro an ingrate, and cites examples when she has helped him out in the past.

Backstage one day, Sumiko offers Kayo, a pretty young actress from the same troupe, some money and asks her to seduce Kiyoshi. Although Kayo at first refuses, she gives in after Sumiko's insistence. She goes to Kiyoshi's post office to make him fall for her. However, after knowing Kiyoshi for some time, she falls for him and decides to tell Kiyoshi the truth. Kiyoshi says it does not matter how it all starts. The two then engage in a relationship which only later is found out by Komajuro.

Komajuro confronts Kayo, who tells him of Sumiko's setup, but only after asserting she now loves Kiyoshi and is not doing it for money. Komajuro has a violent confrontation with Sumiko, and refuses to listen to her plea for a reconciliation.

The manager of the troupe has absconded, and business is bad. Komajuro has no choice but to disband the troupe, and they have a last night together. Komajuro then goes to Oyoshi's place and tells her of his troupe's break-up. Oyoshi persuades him to tell Kiyoshi the truth about his parenthood and then stay together her place as a family. Komajuro agrees. When Kiyoshi later comes back with Kayo, Komajuro becomes so enraged to see them together that he beats both of them repeatedly, leading to a physical tussle between Kiyoshi and him. Oyoshi is forced to reveal to him the truth about his birth there, but Kiyoshi refuses to accept it and goes to his room upstairs. Taking in Kiyoshi's reaction, Komajuro decides to leave after all. Kayo wants to join him, but Komajuro asks her to stay to help Kiyoshi out. Kiyoshi later has a change of heart and goes downstairs to look for Komajuro, but his father has already left.

At the train station, Komajuro tries to light a cigarette but has no matches. Sumiko, who is sitting nearby, comes up and offers him a light. Sumiko asks where Komajuro is going, since she has now no place to go. The two reconcile and Sumiko decides to join Komajuro to start anew under another impresario at Kuwana. The last scene of the film shows Komajuro, tended by Sumiko, in a train heading for Kuwana.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053390/

Audition (1999)

AKA オーディション, Ōdishon

Directed by
Takashi Miike

Written by
Ryû Murakami (novel)
Daisuke Tengan (screenplay)

Shigeharu Aoyama (青山 重治 Aoyama Shigeharu) (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower of seven years, is urged by his 17-year-old son, Shigehiko Aoyama (青山 重彦 Aoyama Shigehiko) (Tetsu Sawaki), to begin dating again. Aoyama is reluctant. His friend and colleague Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (吉川泰久 Yoshikawa Yasuhisa) (Jun Kunimura), a film producer, devises a mock casting audition in which young women would audition for the "part" of Aoyama's new wife. Aoyama tentatively agrees to the plan. He is immediately enchanted by Asami Yamazaki (山崎 麻美 Yamazaki Asami) (Eihi Shiina). In her audition, Asami says that she was a ballerina but had to give up dancing after an injury. Aoyama is attracted to her apparent emotional depth.

Yoshikawa says that he has a bad feeling about Asami. He cannot reach any of the references on her résumé, and her job history is sketchy. The music producer she claimed to work for is missing. Aoyama is so enthralled by her that he pursues the romance anyway.

She lives in an empty apartment, containing a sack and a telephone. For four days after the audition, she sits perfectly still in the middle of the floor next to the telephone, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, the sack lurches across the room and makes gurgling sounds. When Asami answers the phone, she pretends to Aoyama that she never expected him to call.

After several dates, she agrees to accompany him to a seaside hotel. Asami reveals that she was abused as a child and shows burn scars on her body. A deeply moved Aoyama pledges his love, and they have sex. In the morning, Aoyama is awakened by a telephone call. It is the front desk inquiring if he will be checking out since his companion has left. Asami is nowhere to be found.

Aoyama tries to track her down using her résumé, but as Yoshikawa warned all of the contacts are dead ends. At the dance studio where she claimed to have trained, he finds only a man with prosthetic feet who shares the name of Asami's childhood abuser. The bar where she claimed to work has been abandoned for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner. A passer-by tells Aoyama that the police found three extra fingers, an extra ear, and an extra tongue when they recovered the body.

Meanwhile, Asami goes to Aoyama's house. She finds a photo of his late wife. Enraged, she drugs his liquor decanter and hides. Aoyama comes home, pours a drink, and begins feeling the effects of the drug.

A flashback sequence shows that the sack in Asami's apartment contains a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out of the sack and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog dish and places it on the floor for the man. The man sticks his face in the bowl of vomit, and hungrily consumes it.

Aoyama collapses from the drug. Asami injects Aoyama with a paralysis agent that leaves his nerves alert. She tortures him with needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else in her life, he has failed to love her only. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She claims she is teaching him the meaning of needing someone. She tells him that, "Words create lies, pain can be trusted." She giggles as she cuts off his left foot with a wire saw.

Shigehiko returns home as Asami begins to cut off Aoyama's other foot, and they struggle. Aoyama has a dream that he is waking up after he and Asami made love, and that his ordeal was only a nightmare. He awakes from the dream to see his son still struggling with Asami. Shigehiko kicks her down a flight of stairs, breaking her neck. Aoyama tells his son to call the police. Aoyama stares at the dying figure of Asami. She mutters incoherently about her excitement on seeing him again. He remembers that in the dream, he comforted her by saying, "It's hard to forget about, but someday you'll feel that life is wonderful."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/

The Adventure (1960)

AKA L'avventura

Directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni        

Writing credits
Michelangelo Antonioni
Elio Bartolini
Tonino Guerra

L'Avventura has a narrative structure in which an apparently important central mystery is gradually forgotten and left unsolved.

The story begins as two young women, Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti), meet for a yacht trip. After picking up Anna's lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), the three join two wealthy couples from Rome on the boat and visit "Lisca Bianca," an almost unpopulated volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, where Anna shows her boredom and unhappiness with the sometimes childish Sandro. After napping on the rocks, they awaken to find that Anna has gone without a trace. Annoyed at first, then worried, they search for her, helped by Anna's diplomat father who soon comes to the island with a police ship and helicopter.

Within a few days, they drift back to their lives as the story shifts to a new and somewhat stormy relationship between Sandro and Claudia who is at once happy and wracked with guilt over her missing best friend. On the rooftop of a cathedral, Sandro asks Claudia to marry him, but she is too startled by this to answer in a meaningful way. The two then check into a swank resort hotel near Messina where Sandro's business partner is staying. While Claudia goes to bed, Sandro stays up and wanders among the partying guests. Claudia spends a sleepless night waiting for him to come back to their room and as dawn breaks frantically searches for Sandro throughout the deserted public spaces of the hotel, only to find him on a couch with a costly call girl. Claudia flees them both and breaks down into tears on a vista overlooking the sea. Sandro, seemingly disgusted with himself, catches up to her.

The last scene, which has no dialogue, starkly shows Sandro's almost hopeless weakness and emptiness as he sits in tears before a blank, scarred wall. Claudia stands steadfastly beside him, while Mount Etna broods behind her as if ready to erupt.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053619/

Ecstasy of the Angels (1972)

AKA 天使の恍惚 / Tenshi no kôkotsu

Director:
Kôji Wakamatsu

Writer:
Masao Adachi

A group of militant extremists whom we know only by their code names - the days of the week - realize that they've been betrayed by their own organization when a nocturnal weapons raid on a U.S. Army base goes awry. The delicate internal balance of trust and friendship splinters apart. Their already fragile, idealistic young psyches quickly disintegrate into a morass of sexual paranoia, violent recrimination and sadistic torture that completely destroys their ability to function as an organization.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069358/

Stalker (1979)

AKA Сталкер

Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky        

Writing credits
Arkadiy Strugatskiy (novel "The Roadside Picnic")
Boris Strugatskiy (novel "The Roadside Picnic")
Arkadiy Strugatskiy
Boris Strugatskiy

The setting of the film is a tiny town on the outskirts of the Zone, a wilderness area which has been cordoned off by the government. The film's main character, the Stalker, works as a guide to bring people in and out of the Zone, to "the Room", which is said to grant the deepest, innermost wishes of anyone who steps inside. Residual effects of an undefined previous occurrence have transformed an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings into an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply.

The film begins, in black and white, with the Stalker in his home with his wife and daughter. His wife emotionally urges him not to leave her again to go into the Zone because of the legal consequences, but he ignores her pleas. The Stalker goes to a bar, where he meets the Writer and the Professor, who will be his clients on his next trip into the Zone. The Writer and the Professor are never identified by name — the Stalker prefers to refer to them in this way. The three of them evade the military blockade that guards the Zone using an 88" Series II Land-Rover — attracting gunfire from the guards as they go — and then ride into the heart of the Zone on a railway handcar. The camera follows their passage from urban setting to rural, and from the darkness required for their infiltration of the Zone, to light. This is also the point in the movie where the film switches to color.

The Stalker tells his clients that they must do exactly as he says to survive the dangers that, while invisible, are all around them. Although the Stalker describes extreme danger at all times, no harm comes to any of the three men; there is a tension between disbelief of the need for his elaborate precautions and the possibility that they are necessary. The Stalker tests various routes by throwing metal nuts tied with strips of cloth ahead of him before walking into a new area. The Zone appears peaceful and harmless. The Writer is skeptical that there is any real danger, while the Professor generally follows the Stalker's advice.

Much of the film focuses on the trip through the apparently dangerous Zone and the philosophical discussions that the characters share about their reasons for wanting to visit the Room. The Writer appears concerned that he is losing his inspiration, while the Professor apparently hopes to win a Nobel prize. Meanwhile, the Stalker — who explains that he has never gone into the Room himself — quotes from the New Testament and bemoans the loss of faith in society. Throughout the film, the Stalker refers to a previous Stalker, named "Porcupine," who led his poet brother to his death in the Zone, visited the Room and gained a lot of money, and then hanged himself. The implication is that our "deepest, innermost desires" are opaque even to ourselves, and the overt desire to win the lottery was coupled with the covert and unexpressed - perhaps unconscious - desire for his brother's death, and when Porcupine realized this, he killed himself to expiate his guilt. When the Writer confronts the Stalker about his knowledge of the Zone and the Room, he says that it all comes from Porcupine.

The trio first walk through meadows and then enter a tunnel that the Stalker calls "the meat grinder." In one of the decayed buildings, a phone inexplicably begins to ring. The Writer answers and says to whoever is on the other end that "this is not the clinic," and hangs up. The Professor then uses the phone to call a colleague. In the resultant conversation he reveals some of his true motives for having come to the Room. He has brought a bomb with him and intends to destroy the Room out of fear that it could be used for personal gain by evil men. The three men fight verbally and physically; the Professor backs down from his plan to destroy the Room. Their journey ends when they finally arrive at the entrance to the Room. A long take leaves the men sitting outside the Room, who then never enter it.[2] Rain begins to fall from a dark sky where a ceiling once was, into the ruined building, and the rainstorm gradually fades away, all in one shot.

The next scene shows the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor back in the bar. The Stalker's wife and child arrive. A mysterious black dog that followed the three men through the Zone is now in the bar with them. His wife asks where he got it; the Stalker says that it got attached to him and he could not leave it in the Zone. As the Stalker leaves the bar with his family and the dog, we see that his child, nicknamed "Monkey" is crippled, and cannot walk unaided. (Earlier dialogue has suggested that the child is affected by some form of genetic mutation as a "child of the Zone.") Later, when the Stalker's wife says she would like to visit the Room, he seems to have doubts about the Zone; he tells her he fears her dreams will not be fulfilled. While breaking the fourth wall, the Stalker's wife then contemplates her relationship with the Stalker, only to conclude that she is better off with him. The film ends with Monkey alone in the kitchen. She recites a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev and then lays her head on the table and appears to psychokinetically push three drinking glasses across the table, one after the other, with the last one falling to the floor. After the third glass falls to the floor, a train passes by (as in the beginning of the film), causing the entire apartment to shake.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/