The New York Asian Film Festival ran from June 30 to July 16. For more information about what you missed, click here.
The Suffering of Ninko is one of those movies where it’s so much better for having gone in relatively blind, and yet all I want to do is study your reaction as I explain every single thing that happens over the course of its hour-and-change runtime. And this, as I’ve said before and will never tire of telling people, is the true magic of film festivals in general, and (in my experience) the New York Asian Film Festival in particular: at their best, they can offer you a glimpse into the mind of a true weirdo.
Norihiro Niwatsukino is that weirdo, and we are all luckier for his existence.
It has to be said, though on first blush, the title alone sounded anything but promising. I was half-expecting some kind of S&M torture fest, probably involving an innocent housewife set upon by her cruel husband and possibly their neighbors.
(Which, by the way, is not an entirely absurd assumption if you’re at all familiar with the darker corners of Japanese cinema…)
Were that the case, it would certainly be a… let’s say troubling… entry into the festival. But for the New York Asian Film Festival, one tends to make allowances.
HOWEVER.
What I was not expecting was a half live action/half animated T&A fest about a monk that literally every woman in the world wants to fuck.
The Suffering of Ninko is a difficult movie to pin down. It’s a folk tale. It’s a comedy. It’s a horror movie. It’s a nudie film. It juggles wildly disparate tones with an almost eerie confidence, as if it has no concept of how bizarre it truly is.
As with all folk tales, the story is simple as can be: a monk who is inexplicably lusted after by every woman he encounters (and at least a couple of men) blames himself for his sexiness, to the point where it’s interfering with his sense of self and his ability to carry out his duties. In order to get centered, he journeys into the mountains, where his problems demonstrably do not go away.
There’s no point, really, in going into any more detail than that; this is a slight story, the sort of thing it would take five minutes to read if one stumbled upon it in an anthology of international folk tales. But what it lacks in detail, it makes up with its singular tone, simultaneously earthy and transcendent. For all the ways in which this could unfold as the dirty joke the setup implies, the movie actually leans hard into the spiritual aspect. It takes its Buddhism seriously, which only serves to make everything funnier and more off-center.
This respect for the tenets of Buddhism thoroughly infuses every aspect of the film, from the cinematography (which almost hums with soulfulness; every shot of nature seems almost spiritual in its devotion to beauty) to the performances of the monks themselves, all stillness and good humored grace.
(In fact, the de-evolution of Ninko, as it were, can be traced from the shift in his performance; at the start, he is so in tune that his meditations actively invoke Mandala imagery; when he begins to crumble over his powerlessness in the face of his own sexiness, he goes bigger and broader, running around like a cartoon dog on fire and screaming sutras at the top of his lungs as if trying to scare off his hidden desires through sheer volume alone.)
Overall, there is a studied, hypnotic tone to the direction. But that tone is constantly disrupted by the frequent switches to animation, tableaus done in the style of Ukiyo-e art which represent Ninko’s increasingly perverse fantasies and fears. These almost hallucinatory moments effectively convey that however Ninko may be able to resist temptations of the flesh in real life, but he can’t escape the (possibly literal) demons in his own mind.
As the titular Ninko, Masato Tsujioka does a fantastic job. At first his switch from Zen master to gibbering goofus is off-putting, but once the full aims of the story reveal themselves, something clicks and it all makes perfect sense. Also to be commended are Hideta Iwahashi as Kanzo, a samurai Ninko encounters on his journey who is familiar with the legend of Ninko and gets no small amount of pleasure out of tweaking him for it; and Miho Wakabayashi as Yamma-onna, a sex ghost that may or may not be terrorizing a small village, and may or may not be terrorizing Ninko’s dreams, but definitely IS living a clothing optional lifestyle.
That Suffering Of Ninko manages to reconcile all its different tones and ideas feels like something of a movie miracle, and for lovers of the truly bizarre, this is a must-see.
And if you’re not sold on that, there’s a five minute sequence where a topless woman in a noh mask and yoga pants does an interpretive dance to Ravels’ ‘Bolero’ while Ninko is chased through a forest by naked housewives.
And if you can’t appreciate that sort of thing, I’m not even sure how you made it this far into the review in the first place…
(WARNING: Trailer is not even remotely Safe For Work; Click At Your Own Risk)
