TAG (2015)

TAG may or may not have been a nostalgic exercise for Sion Sono, but watching it was a nostalgic exercise for me. Back when I bought my first DVD player, I rushed about trying to see as many exotic movies as were now available to me, picking from the tremendous inventories to be found in places like Borders in those long-gone days. One early purchase was Sono's Suicide Club (also known as Suicide Circle). That film memorably opens with a bunch of schoolgirls marching into a subway station and leaping arm in arm in front of an oncoming train. Waves of blood splashed back onto the platform. Since then, Sono has been a very prolific and eclectic filmmaker. I'd be tempted to call Tag his Sucker Punch if not that there are probably a lot of Sucker Punches in his filmography. In any event, the opening scene will bring back memories for anyone who's seen Suicide Club/Circle. This time the schoolgirls are taking a bus to a field trip. A pillow fight breaks out while Mitsuko (Reina Treindl), apparently an aspiring writer, scribbles in her notebook. Dropping her pen, she ducks down to pick it up off the floor of the bus. That fortuitous move saves her life as a freakish wind shear, which had already torn apart the bus in front, takes the top halves off Mistuko's bus and all her fellow passengers. The driver is seated lower down and only loses her head. The bus slowly comes to a stop as our dazed heroine-by-default stands amid the blood-spurting trunks of her school chums. All righty then....

It occurs to Mitsuko to get off the bus and seek cover. She manages to duck a second wind shear (others aren't so lucky) and makes her way to a pond in the woods, where she finds more bisected corpses. Finding at least one clean set of clothes, she switches into them and makes her way to a school. It's not her school, but everyone there seems to recognize her. She quickly falls in with new friends who decide to play hooky in another part of the woods -- or is it the same location with the bodies gone? Finally they head back to class, but Mitsuko's new teachers prove to be strict disciplinarians, opening fire on their students with machine guns. Again, Mitsuko ends up the final girl, but this is not the final chapter for her.

She finds herself being prepared for a wedding, except now everyone calls her Keiko, and she has actually become a different person (Mariko Shinoda). There are familiar faces among the bridesmaids, however, who advise her that she's going to have to fight her way out of her wedding. By now, when all the wedding guests are girls, audiences may have noticed that we haven't seen a man in the film yet. The girls' congratulations turn to taunts as many strip to their underwear and drag Mitsuko/Keiko to the altar, where the boar-headed groom awaits inside an upright coffin. An ally comes to our heroine's rescue, and as they fight free our protagonist finds herself again transformed (into Erina Mano) and in the homestretch of a distance race, though her teammates are again familiar. Her enemies are following her from one reality to another now as the boar-man and two of the killer teachers join the race. But where in hell is she going?

The truth of the matter isn't too surprising. Crossing over into a male-dominated if not male-only world, she sees herself on a poster advertising "Tag," a virtual-reality game incorporating the scenarios our heroine has survived. The decrepit inventor -- possibly a directorial self-satire? -- explains that all the characters are clones of his long-ago contemporaries: living beings who die real deaths in the game where Mitsuko is the protagonist and final girl. The other girls are slaughtered repeatedly simply to signify her peril. But all through her odyssey, the motif of falling feathers has prompted Mitsuko to question the fatedness of existence, and now she realizes that she can change the course of the game to end the cycle of destruction....

Sono is adapting another author's novel, but Tag can't help but look like a commentary on the excesses of his own work, though in that case it'd also be a case of eating your cake and having it too, indulging his violent imagination while implicitly critiquing it. For all I know, it's just another job of work for a busy filmmaker, but there's enough auteurial personality in every Sono film I've seen -- though those are relatively few -- to make me doubt that. It may still be just another movie in the sense that it marks no special milestone or turning point, but I'll need to see more of his movies before I can judge. It seems easier to see them now than it might have been fifteen or so years ago. The teachers-murdering-students bit might have made Tag taboo in the U.S. once upon a time, but in 2017 you can stream the thing on Netflix. Do so only if you have a strong stomach; the exercise in style may justify your effort.