An elderly killer is looking for an apartment that suits his needs: it has to be spacious, silent and isolated. He hires a young real estate agent who, with almost mechanical meticulousness, takes him around Tokyo and shows him various solutions that never seem to satisfy him. Finally, after their search has taken them to the most rundown suburbs of the city, the old killer seems to have found what he was looking for. “It is not easy to place The Room in Sion Sono’s filmography, this small film is so full of abstraction, oblivion and subtraction compared to the almost baroque mise-en-scène of his other most recent works: Suicide Circle, Noriko’s Dinner Table, Strange Circus, Love Exposure. The Room, silent, static and enigmatic, is also and above all, the representation of the distress of its elderly protagonist and of a difficult life which we are not often shown.” (Fabio Rainelli)
Biography
film director
Sion Sono
Sion Sono (Toyokawa, Japan, 1961) is an internationally acclaimed Japanese filmmaker. His movies depict Japanese society in a provocative and violent way, amid a plethora of pop culture references. His most renown films include Suicide Club (2002), which is part of a trilogy on alienation along with Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), winner of the Berliner Zeitung Jury Award, and Love Exposure (2008), winner of the FIPRESCI Award and the Caligari Film Award at the Berlinale. Love Exposure is also the first film of the “trilogy of hate,” which includes Cold Fish (2010) and Guilty of Romance (2011). He participated to the Venice Film Festival in 2011 with the feature Himizu, and in 2013 with Why Don’t You Play in Hell. The Torino Film Festival paid tribute to him with a retrospective in 2011. He participated in several TFF editions with his films Tokyo Tribe (2014), Love & Peace (2015), TAG (2015) and Shinjuku Swan (2015).
FILMOGRAFIA
The Room (1992), Suicide Club (2002), Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), Strange Circus (2005), Hazard (2006), Exte: Hair Extensions (2007), Love Exposure (2008), Cold Fish (2010), Guilty of Romance (2011), Himizu (2011), Why Don’t You Play in Hell (2013), Tokyo Tribe (2014), Love & Peace (2015), Riaru onigokko (TAG, 2015), Shinjuku suwan (Shinjuku Swan, 2015), Antiporno (2016), Tokyo Vampire Hotel (serie tv/tv series, 2017).
Cast
& Credits
regia, sceneggiatura/director, screenplay
Sion Sono
fotografia/cinematography
Otsuka Yuichir?, Miki Shigenori
montaggio/film editing
Ukai Kunihiko, Sion Sono
musica/music
Yamamoto Kosei, Okano Hiroki
suono/sound
Okano Hiroki
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Maro Akaji (il killer silenzioso/Silent Killer), D?guchi Yoriko (la giovane agente immobiliare/Young Estate Agent), Sano Shir?, Takahashi Sayoko, Matsuda Masao, Uchida Eiichi, Terashima Yuko
produttori/producers
Yasuoka Takuji, Nakano Takayuki, Matsuoka Ry?
vendita all’estero/world sales
Pictures Dept.