Part of David Cairns' Late Show at Shadowplay.
The Music, a late submerged Masumura classic available only through backdoors via a VHS rip with antic image quality, is obviously the work of a mature director who has found his subject and knows where to go with it. What Jonathan Rosenbaum called "a cinema of mad people", I call the exploration of love as a state of mental illness and The Music is the culmination of this probing. More shocking than Blind Beast (which is a feat in itself), more radical than Manji, more twisted than Irezumi, Masumura, who co-wrote the script, distilled everything that made his cinema exciting and frenzied into an even stronger brew, mixing surreal imagery, a hyperventilating camera and a keenly Freudian approach to character work.
Reiko, a middle-aged woman, seeks out the help of a psychiatrist because she feels sick and can't hear music. Soon, however, doc discovers that her problems are of an entirely different nature and that her repressed sexuality is at the roots of all her psychological troubles. "Music" is a metaphor for sexual arousal and pleasure, and Reiko does not enjoy sex (does not hear the music!) unless it is with weak, emasculated men, or corpses. We get a scene with Reiko at a young age, playing rock-paper-scissors with three other boys. The looser of the game, it is established, is getting his penis cut off. Reiko loses first, and the boys hold her against a wall, pull down her pants while one of them kneels in front of her with a pair of scissors...and doesn't find anything to cut. The boys' explanation is that her penis has already been cut off and she is left humiliated, vilified, vanquished. Reiko, then, develops an obsession with scissors and imagines, in a disturbing dream sequence, her legs as a pair of scissors poised to cut off the penises of her lovers, upon which a bull appears to her with horns in the form of overdimensioned penises.
Furthermore, we learn that she had her first sexual experience with her brother, and that she was raped by her fiance which prompted her to leave her native village and flee to Tokyo. However, once she learns that said fiance is dying, she comes back to him and is turned on by the fact that he breathes his last. Once he is dead, she engages in an affair with an impotent man but leaves him once he makes sweet love to her, since his new-found sexual expertise prevents her from hearing "the music". We then get a lot of Reiko's relationship with her brother, a doomed co-dependency that is the key to her sexual repression, and if all of this doesn't seem to make any sense, Masumura and his co-writer Yukio Mishima, the world-famous novelist who played the lead role in Masumura's Afraid To Die, actually pull it off to give a somewhat sensible explanation for all of this when the psychiatrist finally "cures" Reiko.
As crazy as all of this sounds, The Music is as intricate a character study as one is likely to find. Granted, Reiko's character is almost exclusively reduced to her sexual behavior, but we explore it in all its alarming facets and Masumura makes it very explicit that his investigation into lovesick and sick-sexual behavior serves him as a way to unearth greater societal ills of rampant modernity in a confused society. Kisses and Seisaku's Wife are prime examples of this, and although The Music is less focused on issues of society, it can not simply be shrugged off as a sexploitation flick. Themes of family ties and traditional obligations are touched on, albeit obliquely, and Masumura's controversial status as a "women's director" takes on a new facet.
Highly recommended.
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