My notes on Fonotune: An Electric Fairytale, which screened at SciFi London
‘Well, that was pointless,’ deadpans Analog (Kazushi Watanabe), one of very few characters in Bavarian writer-director FINT’s Japanese-language, depopulated end of the world movie. ‘Gotta find something better to do.’ It’s a knowing moment in an arch film which plays like an ambient video exhibit – or a feature-length version of the fictional film glimpsed in Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind – rather than a narrative. Frankly, it feels like a remake of the end credits walkabout of Buckaroo Banzai, slowed down to 33rpm and outliving its welcome even at 75 minutes. Against widescreen vistas of brutal concrete urban wastelands (with passing monorails) and parched deserts, a bunch of characters in headphones wander and vaguely interact … FINT plays Mono, who doesn’t speak, and we also get a hooker (Yuho Yamashita), the drifter Analog, rock chick Stereo (Kiki Sukezane) and rock star Blitz (Guitar Wolf), with cutaways to a disc jockey (Yusuke Yamasaki) and a near-naked girl (Jiwoon Ha) … plus a fellow in a black gimp suit with a box on his head who is billed as ‘cubistic figure’ (Rocco Menzel). It’s very good-looking, with inventive editing as well as picture-making, but it’s so cool and flip that your mind wanders to list-making or checking incidental details rather than pondering what it might be about. Sukezane is the liveliest character, but that doesn’t really make up for the fact that the only other women in the film are sex workers, while all the guys at least go in for rock ‘n’ roll posing.
Here’s the SciFi London listing.
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