V-Cinema Essentials 9: XX: Beautiful Hunter

So we come to the end of the V-Cinema Essentials boxset, Masaru Konuma’s XX: Beautiful Hunter. And so, without further ado, let’s get into it. 

Starting as a small child, Shion (Makiko Kuno) is trained into a killer for a ‘priest’, Kano (Koji Shimizu). Years later, two journalists witness Shion making a kill. Chasing them down, Shion ends up falling for one of them, Ito (Johnny Okura), putting her at odds with the organisation that raised her. 

It’s fair to say that XX: Beautiful Hunter is a pink action film, or a pink thriller. The director’s roots in Roman Porno are no surprise but it’s also a curious beast of a film because it refuses to explain the whys and wherefores and I think this is to its credit. 

The opening, with a very young Shion being given a gun by a nun and asked to shoot a man strapped to a chair as an almost divine act and has no real context beyond setting up who she is. We learn the group is called Magnificat but beyond that little is explained, such whether it has some form of religious roots or uses the forms of one, why it exists, what it does or even if it is really a 'religious’ organisation. If it had been explained at all, I suspect it would have felt even more ludicrous than the setup already is; but as it is just a narrative void, we can accept it because we can fill in the blanks with whatever story, however robust or absurd that may be, ourselves. We don’t even know why Shion is initially made to go kill a houseful of people. It doesn’t matter. It’s just who and what she is, leading to the incident where she's witnessed by our journalists and kickstarting the events of the film. For this purpose, only the bare minimum is required.

As an aside, various aspects of the opening and plot points reminded me of parts of the backstory that unfolds in the anime Noir, and was this in part an inspiration? Answers on a postcard (or email) please. Anyway, back to the film. 

Nothing about XX: Beautiful Hunter is true to life, it’s all about titillating the audience with sex, guns, a bit of romance and even some S&M torture thrown in for good measure. But it’s well crafted: Ito, begging for his life is well paced and constructed - in a series of shots he’s taken about the city, first as a way to get the photos he’s taken of Shion before he's then taken into the bowels of a building to be killed. It’s not overblown as it could have been, instead Ito is given to trying to reason and plead his way out. However, true to the film’s nature this pleading morphs into a neo-sex scene, which is perhaps one of the weirdest segues but in the context of the film makes an odd kind of sense. You see, XX: Beautiful Hunter does have its own internal logic of sorts and it’s one that’s outside the boundaries of normalcy that’s for sure. Part of why this works is perhaps that the film almost never for a moment portrays normal life; with the exception of Ito asking his editor to print his photos to try and save his life, all we witness is him, Shion, members of Magnificat (who in best action tradition are either larger than life or else blank face suits with guns there to be shot by Shion), so we are adrift in this world where Shion kills, Shion falls in love and Shion is put in opposition to her erstwhile friends. 

Not that Magnificat or the blind priest, Kano, are her friends. Shion is a blank tool. She exists to them as an extension of their will, but through Ito discovers herself. Arguably, Makiko Kuno as Shion is at her best while mechanically killing people because she has the acting talent of a wooden doll, and saying that is likely an insult to dolls. But given that she’s often there to be a blank, emotionless killer for at least the first half of the film that works out pretty well. I did wonder if there were some influences of Luc Besson’s Nikita, but in that film Nikita has an interior life that is portrayed and changes over the course of the story. Shion has no interior life until she finds love (and yeah, sex too), cue some pink-tinged sex scenes, though th efilm is smart enough not to lose its focus on story to play up the titillation. And why should it, when towards the end it can go full S&M revenge, with Mitsuko (Maiko Kazama) perhaps a back-up killer, taking magnificent, scenery-chewing delight in torturing Shion in front of an audience – including the priest calmly sipping a glass of (communion?) wine – and the director seems to be enjoying the sheer perversity of the scene, even down to dressing Shion in tight rubber clothing. I mean, we all know a good torture session only works when it’s a good-looking woman in tight rubber clothing, it’s the first lesson we learn after the intricacies of extracting toenails. 

That said the scene feels fitting to the tone of the film, the hyper-sexualisation is laid out before us scene after scene. Yet it never quite tips over into the gratuitous - for all its absurdities XX: Beautiful Hunter manages to stay just the right side of ludicrous. You may blink because you cannot quite believe what you are seeing, but you never roll your eyes.

If reality had encroached further into the film the incredulity would have been a risk, but the sheer artifice of it all, the purity with which it presents its story (however bonkers it may be at times) means it remains entertaining. Exploitative perhaps, but always entertaining.