A Man's Flower Road

Director: Sion Sono, Sion Sono

1986 / 110min / DCP

Sono’s broke-backed, brazen first feature, made when its director was only 24, opens with a hysterical chase scene that concludes with Sono (also starring), clad only in a red raincoat, discovering a band of Kappa—water creatures described in Japanese folklore—living in Tokyo’s canals… before leaping unexpectedly into an autobiographical register with a shomin-geki-like story of stifling domestic existence, in which the director’s family members play themselves. Audacious and obnoxious, it ends with Sono writing something like the film’s moral on a Tokyo tramline: “Life sucks.”