Tag (2015)

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Director: Sion Sono

Screenplay: Sion Sono and Yûsuke Yamada

Cast: Reina Triendl as Mitsuko, Yuki Sakurai as Aki, Mariko Shinoda as Keiko, Maryjun Takahashi as Jun, Sayaka Isoyama as Mutsuko

Synopsis: On a trip out for an all-girls school, Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) is the only survivor of a freak incident where a gust of wind bisects everyone (even the bus) in half. To her surprise, traumatised and wandering back to school, she finds everyone on said bus is okay and back there. This is the beginning of Mitsuko finding herself in increasingly bizarre circumstances...

[Major Plot Spoilers Throughout]

At this point, I really am clueless in my opinion on Sion Sono. The director has been making films for over two decades and change now, and has overtaken Takashi Miike for many as a buzz name for cult Japanese cinema. Miike however, for all his reputation, had clear obsessions with male-male friendships, with outsiders and various themes, alongside a willingness to step into numerous genres. Sono, unfortunately, hasn't really themes barring a liking for bright colour and transgressive gore, and in the 2010s, it feels at times as he's narrowing his genres to less rewarding circumstances. Before Love Exposure (2008), the film that is viewed as his magnum opus - it's over hours long, it was a glorious experience for me and many to witness - he was one of the many fascinating Japanese genre directors in the early 2000s making strange but compelling films like Suicide Club (2001). Now he's even directed a TV mini-series for Amazon Prime called Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017) but he's also in danger of predictability.

This is a criticism I am willing to concede if a film like The Whispering Star (2015) blows me away. However, when he's been serious, he's also made Antiporno (2016) - I've softened on it, but making an anti-porn film for the Nikkatsu reboot of pinku cinema series was not only just being a contrarian for the sake of it, but it was still exploitive and pretentious as hell. Tag's a complicated case of being predictable to a fault eventually when it looked like it would succeed eventually. The reason is a very simple, one line criticism - that the plot twist Tag eventually builds to is clichéd and dumb. Once the film shows its cards, the story is revealed to be that of a living video game character, cloned like her friend and teachers to be constantly killed off in an interactive spectacle. So it becomes a clichéd tale of a puppet removing her strings which feels less interesting than that of a schoolgirl fighting against predestined events.

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For a while, before this problem comes about, Tag feels like it will have something much more to go with, feeling like a Sushi Typhoon film which decided to have more ambition barring being intentionally bad and prosthetic effects. The opening cannot match Suicide Club's mass teenage jump in front of a train, but the sight of half a bus trundling along with most of the occupants sans above their waist is something rare to see. You do suffer from bad CGI, and it's never explained why the wind's able to slice people in half (or like a perverted version of The Happening (2008) blowing up schoolgirl skirts at opportunistic times) but that becomes part of the sense of the irrational that seeps throughout the material. A participant in an utterly illogical world, Mitsuko is naturally traumatised, only that she'll find herself changing names and age as she goes along, the emotional anchor which helps her and the film her friends who act like guides to help her through the insanity around her.  

From there it is Mitsuko being thrown through various bizarre scenarios. The school where, after (admittedly) a sweet series of interactions between her and her friends, debating the idea of multiple realities and predestination, turns into the teacher recreating the Most Dangerous Game on the entire student populous. Or to a cross town race where, suddenly, leathered female assassins chase Mitsuko, or when Mitsuko is a bride at a wedding where the groom's a horrible pig man in a casket and the guests are all sociopaths to be fought. Noticeably as well, in one of Tag's cleverer aspects, there's a complete absence of men throughout three-quarters of its length, until the twist appears revealing the women to be characters with a game played by men. The film manages some semblance of logic in between before this twist where, truthfully, even if the segments make no sense together barring strange scenarios Sono came up with the characters are engaging enough for this to never matter. Reina Triendl as Mitsuko is perfect, being the listless and confused lead pulled from scenario to scenario whilst Yuki Sakurai as her closest friend Aki, by the end demanding Mitsuko to rip her in half to escape into the real world through a door opened between her, is sympathetic as the one figure who is a constant and helps Mitsuko through these maddening scenarios. So much so when, in one of the best moments of Tag, Aki's character was fleshed out enough that her male doppelganger and his recreation of her mannerisms, with the actor with similar eyes to Sakurai, is enough to convey who they are before the dialogue reveals it.

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Production wise, bad CGI at the beginning excluded, even if it might've been deliberate for dark humour, Tag shows a lot of resource. The most noticeable is that Sion Sono discovered the drone camera, and if anything, the moment we've learnt to attach film cameras to flying remote control drones has proven to be one of the best things that could happen for an independent filmmaker. As Sion shows, the restrictions on creative ambition due to the expense of resources has been undercut by advantages like this, a drone camera having levelled the playing field to the point an aesthetics obsessive like myself can praise low budget films like this which use these drone shots, fluid movement as it sores across elaborate set pieces from below. It's an example of creativity that shows, when focuses, Sion Sono can be on-ball and be interest, rather than reliant of shock tactics like his least interesting films like Antiporno. Of note as well, in his good aesthetic decisions, is hiring a Japanese post-rock band named Mono to score Tag; it's the last type of score you'd expected for a cult film like this, but it adds a gravitas which helps the film out immensely.

Sadly, after that scene the disappointment sets it. Tag is compelling both as a weird cult film and also because, held together by an all-female cast, it is interesting to watch. The final act ruins this by leading to a very generic twist with pointless touches. That ultimately the creator wants to have Mitsuko reproduced with Aki's male doppelganger, and turning a fascinating take on a videogame character finding herself and escaping into the generic, obvious plot kind. That the game itself, scrolling between three scenarios at once, would be unplayable just emphasises that Sion Sono didn't think Tag as thoroughly as one would hope. So what for most of its length was hopefully building to something interesting from Sono, worth seeing still, does have the unfortunate lack of a decent ending.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

Tag gave me some hope that Sion Sono is still making good films. Tag also gave me Sion Sono's bad tendencies which have become apparent within the 2010s. A shame really.

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