Review: "A Snake of June," Dir. Shinya Tsukamoto (2002)

This is a very strange movie. I won't try to summarize the plot. Let's just put it this way: beautiful, young wife married to neurotic, bald, dumpy middle-aged husband. She's a phone counselor. She gets "photo stalked" by one of her clients, who blackmails her with voyeuristic photos into exploring her sexual fantasies. This eventually leads to an extremely sexy scene involving rain and a flash camera. That particular scene is great--reverse voyeurism with the husband as voyeur. But there's a lot here I didn't understand, and not just because it's a Japanese movie. From my brief web search, other viewers have had a similar problem with understanding what's going on. Big questions: What's that snake thing that comes out of the stalker's pants in the scene between the husband and stalker near the end of the film? What about the cancer plot twist? When the film ends, with the husband and wife having sex, does that mean that Rinko (the wife) will die soon? Comparisons to Cronenberg and Lynch seem appropriate. Imagine Lynch in Japanese.

Final word: Not for most tastes, mine included.