Love & Peace

Ryoichi is the man everyone in the office mocks; he played punk when he was young and gave it up. One day he buys a turtle and names it Pikadon. When his colleagues find the animal and humiliate him, he flushes it away. Down in the sewer the turtle lands in a place where discarded toys talk. Above ground, Ryoichi becomes famous overnight. The subject is not fame but where thrown-away things go. The toys in the sewer are objects their owners abandoned and all of them are waiting to be taken back; the film tells that strand in the register of a children's story while the story above grows steadily crueller. The form is deliberately mismatched. Puppet toys, a giant turtle, a stadium concert and scenes of weeping all in one film. Sion Sono makes no attempt to hold a tone; the result is sometimes moving and sometimes entirely ridiculous. The source is an old text. The director said he wrote the basis of the screenplay years earlier, in a period when he could not yet make films, which explains where the failed-musician strand comes from. The turtle's name comes from the Japanese word for the sound of an atomic explosion. Hiroki Hasegawa plays Ryoichi and Kumiko Aso his colleague. Who it is for: viewers who like Sion Sono's genre-free films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting consistency; the film abandons its own register entirely by the end.