Sundance: Renegade Japanese author Sion Sono and totally normal American actor Nicolas Cage make beautiful nonsense together.
Some films do not seem inevitable until they are made. The most absurd thing about Sion Sono’s “Prisoners of the Ghostlands” – a psychological sukiyaki western that launches Nicolas Cage as a criminal on a mission to rescue a runaway girl from a post-apocalyptic desert before the bombs stuck to his balls explode – is that it didn’t exist yet.
This is the first film that Sono has filmed (predominantly) in English, and the first film that Cage has filmed with a (predominantly) Japanese team, but “Prisoners of the Ghostland” leaves no doubt that these two wild men speak the same language. If this gonzo cross-cultural mash-up pulls more ideas than skin on your bones, well, it’s easy to forgive Sono and Cage for being a little excited about the encounter for the first time (it may be interesting to note that Sono suffered a heart attack during the pre -production that thwarted plans to roll out in Mexico and put the project at risk until Cage suggested moving everything to Japan.)
Everyone except the more ad-hoc aspects of “Prisoners of the Ghostland” shine with the thrill of watching two fully controlled artists share a vision. Even when nothing else in the film makes sense, the unbalanced ethos of his own creation leaves a trail behind with the clarity of a chalk body outline. The same goes for the film’s title: as much as this is a story about anything, it’s about breaking the shackles of where you are from and finding new strength with the people you meet along the way. There may be many occasions when this story is told more convincingly behind the scenes than in front of it. But there are also other times when Cage looks screaming at the sky while stretching the word “testicle” by the length of an aria.
For those who do not know the poet emeritus of ero guro nansensu (lit. “erotic grotesque absurdity”), Sono emerged from the sewers of Japanese underground cinema as an irrepressible rat king that transformed the punk energy of Oshima Nagisa, the wicked nihilism of Tsukamoto Shinya and the renegade chaos of Suzuki Seijun into a coherent body of work that continues to mutate in wonderfully unexpected ways. A random, reductive sample of Sono’s films may include a four-hour epic about the overlap between organized religion and upper-skirt photography (“Love Exposure”), a great guignol rap opera about the gang war that breaks out after a mobster a micro-penis (“Tokyo Tribe”) and a romantic epic about a passionate musician whose pet turtle evolves into a giant kaiju are discovered after he flushes the toilet (“Love & Peace”). In other words, collaborating with Cage – an actor you must know in your 57 years as Nicolas Cage – may be the most predictable thing Sono has ever done.
Their collaboration is a meeting of minds that immediately deliver on their orgiastic promise, when the outlaw hero (Cage) wielding a shotgun bursts through the doors of a half-empty bank shouting “Banzai!” for the terrified Japanese clientele. Not at all heroic! To make matters worse, Hero is not alone: he is accompanied by his huge partner in crime, Psycho (director of “The Notebook”, Nick Cassavetes), who is doing a much better job living up to his name. Welcome to another day in the border town of Samurai Town, an anachronism of two horses that seems to run along the border between Westworld and Tokyo Disney.
The Sweet Peach Street scene is a sight to behold, while Sono transforms a studio into an electric fusion of people, cultures and ages. There is a cherry tree on each sidewalk and a cowboy hat on each head. Classic Japanese architecture is adorned with electronic tickers in English, local children coexist with a frightening Frenchman in a cake tie, and the only street in the city appears to be a dusty dead end that ends with a huge cuckoo clock filled with disembodied heads that go out to chant sinister poetry. Is it really a watch or just vaguely evocative of one? Who knows. Regardless, he anticipates a film that – in its own obscure form – is concerned with the stagnation of time and the oppression with which it keeps us slaves (not only in our time, but also in the time that we inherit).
The Samurai city may appear to follow the rules of its own chronology, but its residents serve at the mercy of a man known as “the biggest and most powerful watch”. That would be the governor (Bill Moseley), a white man in an even whiter suit, and some people don’t like living under the tick of his watch – none other than his adopted granddaughter Bernice (“Climax” star, Sofia Boutella, always willing to be weird), who drives a sedan with some friends and flees into the death-infested desert beyond. To recover it, the governor enlists the help of the only person who may be desperate enough to go there and rescue him before it is too late.
It is here that the script by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai really begins to deviate from the traditional path. Hero is your basic, concise badass with a heart of gold – imagine Nic Cage making Mad Max a little more talkative and you’ll be almost there – but his circumstances are … unusual. On the one hand, he is forced to wear leather overalls equipped with explosives and designed to “recognize the impulse of a man willing to hit a helpless woman”. On the other hand … well, there really doesn’t have to be anything else when you have a time bomb sewn into your balls. The governor, it seems, does not really want anyone to “dirty his property”. The hero has three days to get it back (tick, tick) and all the motivation a man may need.
From there, “Prisoners of the Ghostland” follows the journey of a hero who has been transformed into origami in an almost unrecognizable way. In about five minutes, Hero is pulling Bernice out of a sewn-in meat mask (everyone wears this in Ghostland – it’s part of his mutant fallout chic). This leaves Sono with so much time to throw new things in the pot that his film starts to look like he’s cooking on an allegory for himself.
What follows is a difficult pivot from “Escape from LA” to “Beyond Thunderdome” – severe even by the usual Sleep patterns – while Hero is hailed by the outcasts as a savior and soon finds himself leading an unorganized army of mutants and children savages in a rebellion against the corrupt forces of the city of Samurai. It is a battle that seems secondary to Sono’s interests; the post-Fukushima director’s work was haunted by images of abandoned humanity and atomic decay, and “Ghostland Prisoners” spends large parts of the film forcing Hero to confront the cruel absurdity of life among people left to die in poisoned land .
The conflict between Hero and his villains is so poorly outlined that it may seem incidental, but Sono has the best time of his life digging into a script that fuses American and Japanese cultures through the terrible power of their shared nuclear bond. Is there a significant relationship between Hero and the war bride that makes him dangerously excited? There is not. Is there any sense of narrative momentum going into the (atypically indifferent) climactic confrontation? Not a drop.
But there is a winged “Rat Man” whose modulated voice makes him sound like a Muppet who played with toxic waste, a prophecy about a man with “thick red blood” who will be the salvation of Ghostland and a dramatic reading of “The Wuthering Heights ? “Of course there is! The film is never more surprising than when Sono deigns to fill in some of the gaps, as his only scene of pure exposure is inspired by the preventive demonstrations held outside the Hiroshima Peace Memorial every August, and moving by how it allows Ghostland’s ridicule to reflect on the horrors of our own world.
“Ghostland Prisoners” may lose you during some of your emotionally less lucid moments, but even in the Hero’s confusion, Cage always seems to know where he is and what he should do. He is the unstoppable engine of a strangely calm film that often seems to be rolling in smoke; maybe it’s just the fact that his character’s testicles will explode out of his body if he doesn’t keep things moving, but the actor never lets us forget that time is running out.
Working with a director who complements his destabilizing energy (instead of just tolerating it) has become the obvious secret to unlocking Cage’s full potential, and Sono – much like the author of “Mandy” Panos Cosmatos or the director of ” Dog Eat Dog “Paul Schrader – has the vision of the galaxy’s brain to shoot its star so that it feels like a natural expression of the film around it. “Prisoners of Ghostland” is a film about a fallen world that will be lost in time until it can escape the chaos of its own creation. The hero can only hope to earn his name and save his testicles if he finds a way to turn that chaos into freedom. Luckily for the wretched in Ghostland, Sono and Cage formed an alliance that shows the world how to do just that.
Serie B-
“Prisoners of the Ghostland” debuted at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. RJLE Filmes will launch it in the United States later this year.
Sign up: Stay on top of the latest film and TV news! Sign up to receive our newsletters by email here.