The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine

A film accidentally given to me by a friend who said "you may as well watch it" so I did. A sprawling three-hour epic about *checks notes* the travails of a small anarchist group and the dying days of female sumo wrestling in the years following the devastating 1923 Great Kanto earthquake. Despite a huge level of inconsistency throughout, we get a voiceover as well as captions, random leaps in time. Sequences that roll on for ages without much point and a general lack of focus both thematically and narratively. But despite all that I was entranced by my ignorance over it as a subject. Not vital by any means but I'm glad I saw it. The strange act of watching it stands as testament to the very random nature of how I acquired it.

I just got the question if I've ever left the cinema during a movie and came to think about this terrible movie. I saw it on gothenburg film festival which usually is a quality guarantee, but this time it was a total disaster. Unfortunatley I didn't leave, although I hated every minutes of the movie.

Generally when you see an extraordinary terrible movie you might say: "Give me my 1 hour and 40 minutes back". However, this movie stole more than 3 hours of my life.

The storyline was chaotic and made no sense, which was extra disappointing since the historic era it depicts sounded so fascinating beforehand, and the over acting was by far the worst I've ever seen. In this case it's not a cultural thing. I know that japanese can be very expressive as it is, but this reached a level where I couldn't help myself laugh laughing through many of the most dramatic scenes.

I think that what utterly made this movie unbearable to watch was that there had been so much energy put into it. Everything in the production looked very professional which in a way pointed out how terrible every other aspect of the entire movie was.

It's a bit late, but I hope that these words will help at least someone from watching this 3+ hours long failure of a movieproduction.