AKA ANA

Directed by Antoine d'Agata

Reviewed by Matthew Brown
May 4 2009

Aka Ana is an hour of video slow-mo, vaginas, and whispered Japanese. People left in droves. In a very real way, it's a triumph for transgressive cinema that this film was shown to a Toronto audience at all; it is also a testament to the souls of those good honest folk that so many of them couldn't handle it.

The film has more vaginas per minute than any other film of its classification. Vaginas undulating, opening, closing, flowering, withering, glistening, soaking, throbbing, clutching, spasming, and orgasming again and again and again. A breast or an anus might occasionally cross the camera's foggy, night-vision gaze, and sometimes we are even blessed with a face with which to attempt to reattach a sense of self to the endless succession of disembodied parts, but otherwise we seem to see nothing but vaginas. Vaginas as sole objects; vaginas as mechanisms.

In shuddering low-light video the prostitutes of Tokyo make their world. They make themselves come, are made to come by other women, and make men come. They are raped, they fuck, they buy pleasure, they are paid for pleasure. Late in the film we watch one cry and scream in pain as she is fucked for what seems like forever from behind by a male body, so-called because no indentifiers beyond the rude outline of his form are ever allowed to intrude into the prostitute's visible world. The film is an endless whirling funnel of near-meaningless visual debris, coagulating into what might be a jagged, gnawing slash of a truly subversive lifestyle.

Ana is an experimental doc which hits the ground level of the sex industry in Japan and keeps descending. To call it gritty is pretentious. It is microscopic, subterranean, intolerable, absorbing, and vile.

The women are all called Iku, but that is not their real name; they muse on their station and the position of sexual power, and orgasmic pleasure, in their lives in a series of affected monologues as the parade of sexual machinery pulses and strobes across the screen. Is it in service of anything? With a voiceover and a photographer-cum-filmmaker's artistic imprimateur, would the Paris Hilton video have been called an escstatic excision of feminism from within the pit of darkness?

There is something here, I think, but whether an audience will find it worth the violence is unclear. I am glad I saw it, glad I made it through all of it. At the least, Aka Ana is a window into a world unseen, via the gaze of a person who likely has no right to be there, and the entire affair is unsettling, disturbing, and - here appropriately - chaotic. It's awful, but I'm not convinced that it shouldn't be.

The screening was preceeded by a short film, Colours of Blood, by Uli Hesse. Rough and unassuming, the 15-minute documentary peers into the lives of real-life "vampires," or blood fetishists, and by virtue of its own startling subject matter becomes quite gripping as the tales of exsanguinatory excess pile up. By the time a fiftyish brit is describing how nicely O-Neg mixes with a good red wine, the most defiant audience member will be squirming with bracing sexual glee.