WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL?: Mankind's Greatest Achievement

Director: Sion Sono
Writer: Sion Sono
Cast: Fumi Nikaido, Jun Kunimura, Shin'ichi Tsutsumi, Hiroki Hasegawa, Gen Hoshino, Tomochika, Itsuji Itao, Tak Sakaguchi
Runtime: 129 mins.
2014 (USA)

Where to begin?

Why Don't You Play in Hell? is about a squad of childhood filmmaker friends called the Fuck Bombers, led by a charismatic figure whose goal in life is to make one truly great piece of cinema that will resonate for generations.

But Why Don't You Play in Hell? is also about a young actress who is running away from her responsibilities, trying to find her place in the world, and committing twisted acts of violence against those who get in her way.

Then again, Why Don't You Play in Hell? is actually about two rival yakuza gangs whose leaders are both obsessed with the aforementioned actress. They come to blows over this obsession, and to resolve old rivalries, and to make one truly excellent movie.

More than anything though, Why Don't You Play in Hell? is about a strange toothpaste commercial that knits the plot, characters, and themes together into a satisfying whole.

What I'm trying to tell you is that Hell? is a movie that deliberately defies any sort of concise and sensible summary, so I'm going to stop trying.

I'll play my hand immediately and say that Hell? is a visual masterpiece. Every scene crackles with vitality and unique personality. I guess you could say Hell? has a consistent tone that exists in the realm of absurdism, but the movie achieves that absurdism in a hundred different ways using every cinematic tool in the book. Director Sion Sono, cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto, and editor Jun'ichi Ito are an unbelievably functional team. The scene compositions are lovely, the movement of the actors and camera through them is mesmerizing, and the editing... ohh, the editing! Sono's work is heavily influenced by hip hop, and that sensibility bleeds into the pacing. Scene transitions are easy to phone in. Finish one scene, cut to an establishing shot for the next one. That's not how Hell? works though. Every cut from one scene to another filled me with delight. Sono sometimes makes these cuts maintain a blistering forward momentum, and sometimes defies that momentum by knocking the viewer off balance. So often a scene would be cut off before its intuitive endpoint, leaving us to infer or wonder about what was left unseen; alternately, many scenes would last at least a few seconds longer than they had any obvious reason to, a technique that lets a dramatic moment breathe, or allows for butt-gustingly funny reaction shots (every performer in this movie is superb, by the way).

The great defect of the vast majority of American comedies is their lack of any significant visual language. Every joke in most comedies already exists on the page. The humor consists of clever lines of dialogue, happenstance occurrences, and the timing of its hopefully talented actors. Comedy filmmakers rarely use any of the tools specific to cinema, tools that work far more effectively than dialogue alone in crafting jokes. On the other hand, the best filmmakers create a visual language such that you could watch their movies on mute and still more or less understand the story. This is a bit trickier with comedy, but the claim still stands. Just watch an old Chaplin or Keaton routine and you'll discover all sorts of ways in which situational movement alone can be hilarious. Here's an excellent video essay about the ways in which editing, movement, and composition enhance cinematic comedy.

Why Don't You Play in Hell? uses all those tricks and more, making this hybrid meta-action-comedy-thriller funnier than every single straight-up American comedy I have ever seen.

The thing about transcendent filmmaking is that, as we see in Spielberg or the Coens' oeuvre, their movies defy genre and juggle tones. A great deal of Hell? is achingly hilarious, but the humor can take a sharp turn into disturbing violence, genuine romance, or even soulful beauty. The swip-swapping of these tones is a highwire act that, when done correctly, enhances each aspect of the movie with each other aspect. Sono's grip on this principle is tremendous, sometimes rolling beauty, humor, and horror up into one incredible scene composition, like this:

Or this:

Whaaaaat just look at that image.

Between my confused, fractured summary, and my description of Sono's heightened absurdism, you probably think the plot of Hell? is alienating at worst and minimal at best. I wouldn't blame you, as that was my assumption going into it. You know what though, we were all wrong. Knowing what little I did about Sono's work, the most surprising aspect of this movie for me was the intricacy of the plot. I'll grant that not everything makes sense, per se, but the weird threads of Hell? are all tied together in surprising and satisfying ways. I was fully prepared for characters and gags to be one-offs or nonsense tangents, but everybody has a role to play in this film, all building towards the massive climactic conflict. In addition to all of its other merits, Hell? is spectacularly paced and structured; Sono has built this movie so that by the time you have navigated almost two hours of weirdness, not a moment of which was unenjoyable, your excitement for the ending of the film has reached a fever pitch. I found myself grinning and edging forward in my seat in the minutes leading up to the climax, a position I maintained for most of that final extended over-the-top sequence.

And all of it comes back around to that weird little toothpaste commercial that kicks everything off.

The promotional poster at the top of this review boasts the tongue-in-cheek pull quote, "Mankind's greatest achievement." I like to infer a bit of ambiguity into that sentiment. Does it refer to the film itself, or in a more oblique way is it talking about cinema in general? When you consider it, films have got to be one of the crowning achievements of humanity. The fact that we are able to record visual stimuli, cut it up so that it works on our brains in something approximating cause-and-effect spacetime, and tell stories with that? The fact that many films need thousands of people and millions of dollars to make, and that the great ones require all of those people and resources to be on the exact same page to make a perfect film that often initially issued from a single visionary's inspiration? It feels like a miracle.

But since Hell? is a metacommentary on filmmaking and all of the love, passion, and interpersonal relationships that bleed on and off the screen, I feel no need to distinguish between Hell? specifically and filmmaking writ large. The disturbing triumph of that final half hour, leading into the manic final shot, a representation of the blood sweat and tears every filmmaker must channel into their art... it represents the entire history and potentiality of film as a medium. Mankind's greatest achievement.

5 / 5  BLOBS