Sion Sono
dir. Sion Sono
Japan 2005, 159’
Subtitles: Polish
Screenings
04.10.2023, 22:00
Cinema Muranów
An intensifying conflict with her possessive, despotic father prompts 17-year-old Noriko to flee her provincial home town for the capital, where she hooks up with Kumiko, a girl she met on the internet platform Haikyo.com, an anonymous teen chat site. The mysterious Kumiko, who goes by Ueno Station 54 on the chat site, runs a company called I.C. Corp, which hires out fictional family members to lonely clients to enable them to experience at least fleeting periods of family happiness.
In films such as Noriko’s Dinner Table the horror lies not in some magical creature, in the illusory virtual world. On the one hand it offers refuge from an oppressive reality, and allows anonymity, but on the other it renders the main character vulnerable to contact with someone devoid of a tangible identity and with unclear intentions.
“Many have found Noriko’s Dinner Table far more terrifying than ordinary Japanese horror films, which set out merely to frighten their audiences,” its director comments.
Prizes and festivals
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2005 - Special Mention, Don Quijote Award: Sono Shion
Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival 2006 - Best Actress: Fukiishi Kazue, Citizen's Choice Award: Sono Shion
Yokohama Film Festival 2007 - Best New Talent: Yoshitaka Yuriko
Sion Sono
In the wake of the success of Suicide Club, Sono Shion was invited to write a novel based on the film. He found the reprocessing of a story already told into prose boring, however, so he decided instead to take one of the episodic characters and tell her story. When the novel was finished, he decided he would adapt it for film, and so Noriko’s Dinner Table was born.
Suicide Club and Noriko’s Dinner Table have a lot in common as spine-tinglers and Sono’s mastery of the brooding, foreboding mood. And though the plot lines intersect, they are by no means sufficiently related to be considered as original and sequel – for the simple reason that the second film does not solve any of the mysteries present in the first. They differ, too, in their plot structures: Noriko’s Dinner Table is divided into a series of chapters devoted to the various characters. The non-linear narration and criss-crossing perspective reveals the multidimensionality of the nightmare that is the triviality and ostensible security of the quotidian.
Production team
director: Sion Sono
screenplay: Sion Sono
camera: Tanikawa Sōhei
editor: Itō Jun'ichi
score: Hasegawa Tomoki
cast: Fukiishi Kazue, Tsugumi, Yoshitaka Yuriko, Miyata Sanae
producer: Suzuki Takeshi
distributor: Mother Ark Co. Ltd.
language: Japanese
colour/ BW: colour
