“Long ago, there was a French poet, Henri Michaux. At the movies, he’d only ever look at the extras, never the stars.”
This passionate statement is said directly into the camera near the close of cult director Sono Sion’s Red Post on Escher Street and it’s as close as we get to a thesis in this dizzying anti-celebrity love letter to the behind-the-scenes of filmmaking. Sono’s throughline here doesn’t come from a star’s anchoring performance, but from the unsung heroes of the film set, those who don’t get their big-break, the people perhaps more interesting than what we see on screen.
To try and sum up this film’s plot is a losing battle, but it’s important to convey the appeal of a disjointed story such as this; a hearty, if not sometimes roundabout meal which doesn’t reveal its connective tissue until the last course. In the beginning it is about a legion of actresses auditioning for a new movie by hotshot indie director Kobayashi Tadashi (Yamaoka Tatsuhiro), who could very well be a stand-in for Sono’s graveyard of maverick ideas shot down by unimaginative studio heads. Soon afterwards, it becomes clear that whoever gets the part is secondary in importance to the identities of those who don’t.
The structure itself depends entirely on the use of multiple perspectives, making for a looser, fattier, character-driven riff of Rashomon’s fundamentals. Via numerous intertitle placards, the viewer becomes a makeshift baton, passed from detour to detour, from novice actress to puppeteered producer to legendary extra (an old fart whose pride and joy are the 10-15 second clips of himself on-screen in the backgrounds of 40 different movies), so that we might get a more honest picture of who and what a film production is.
This kind of frenetic script does have its drawbacks, and accordingly, the second act is a monster slog. From being introduced to a new host of characters every 15 minutes to having to accept being thrown into tangent after tangent without any rhyme or reason; the light at the end of the tunnel (the finale) almost disappears. And boy does that tunnel feel long (the 2hr 28min runtime on this is not one that flies by).
Fear not though, Sono devotees! For the payoff in this film will make weight seem like a mere inconvenience as we float into the atmosphere, electrified by the silence and anticipation that follows the command: “Action!”
The megacorporation “art as commodity” mentality has a long history of wrapping its poisonous tendrils around creative expression and freedom in the filmmaking industry, but the topic is more relevant now than ever thanks to soulless piles of cash like bald-headed-bozo-Bezos, and Red Post on Escher Street realizes this, imagining the possibilities of a film set without those financial pressures. Kobayashi wants one thing in life, and it’s to make his film the way he wants to. But the forces that be — the powerful financiers dictating so much of the greenlighting process — hardly allow him that option.
It’s safe to say that Sono is on form here, drawing out top-notch performances by a mostly non-professional cast, with Fujimaru Sen as the standout in her frightening whirlwind of fury and fists. While not as bloody as Why Don’t You Play in Hell? and not as contentious as his trademark ero guro works like Suicide Club, Sono has once again proven he’s a director willing to take risks and experiment with the form in every direction possible.
