"Helter Skelter" Slices Open The Modeling World

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 11 July 2013 15:56

Written by Renzo Adler

Sitting at a junction between Dorian Gray and Hello Kitty, Helter Skelter (directed by photographer Mika Ninagawa, and showing at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco and the JAPAN CUTS film fest in New York ), is about a supermodel’s candy-colored swath of self destruction. Based on the manga (Japanese comic book) by Kyoko Okazaki, Helter Skelter intersects the much coveted guilty pleasure of celebrity meltdowns with body horror and surgery reminiscent of David Cronenberg in a vibrant and storybook-like backdrop.

Helter Skelter follows Lilico, played by model and actress Erika Sawajiri, an ethereal supermodel that is the only thing on the minds of Tokyoites. Indeed, even other character’s lives have little meaning outside of their relation to Lilico. Lilico is addicted to radical plastic surgery from a black market clinic that is under investigation by a methodical detective (played by Nao Omori) that is also obsessed with her. Most of Lilico’s body is actually artificial or transplanted, and as Lilico’s mind starts to decay, so too does her body, and the film immediately places a scalpel of Damocles over her head. Desperately looking for some kind of control in her jaded life, Lilico uses her sexuality and desirability as a way to play with her doting assistants, but this only staves off decay and madness for so long as Lilico must compete with a new it-girl.

Lilico believes the world revolves around her, but where other films usually emphasize that this is only delusion, everything about Helter Skelter just affirms Lilico’s worldview.  She’s everywhere in TV, movies, magazine, and the police that are supposed to be investigating the clinic where she’s getting her treatments spend most of their time as a Greek Chorus espousing on how beautifully tragic Lilico is. The movie sends mixed signals about whether Lilico is a sociopath or a victim by having the rest of the world be complicit with her egomania.

The camera spends it’s sweet time pouring over Lilico’s (often naked) body. Maybe the film wants to desensitize you to the idea of the human body being erotic and appealing by lingering over Lilico’s form so much that she just becomes a hunk of meat symbolic of the disposable nature of her profession. ...Or maybe it’s very easy to just fill time in the movie with shots of Lilico’s body rather than progressing the story.

A quick jaunt to the internet reveals that Sawajiri has courted popularity and controversy and expressed frustrations with the modeling world she is entrenched in. These parallels with Lilico are more than mere coincidence, Sawajiri stated that’s what attracted her to the role in the first place.

Helter Skelter also plays a precarious balancing act with it’s aesthetics, trying to decide between visuals grounded in reality, or a more garish appearance that keeps with the film’s manga roots. It creates a disconnect when you see everyday schoolgirls talking and milling about in regular old Tokyo, then shift to Lilico’s apartment, which look like a cross between A Clockwork Orange and a super villain’s lair. I appreciate these visual touches and at times they’re absolutely gorgeous, but I just wish the film would make up it’s mind about whether to tell a story grounded in reality, or set in a world gone mad.

Overall, Helter Skelter does bring up some interesting issues surrounding gender politics, identity, sexuality, and self image, but it only skirts around these issues, rather than trying to reach a point more specific than that things shouldn’t be this way, and that these are all part of a self-sustaining cycle of self loathing. Despite these shortcomings in it’s narrative, Helter Skelter still provides a very vibrant visual flair in it’s storybook approach to celebrity meltdowns that we see play out on TV all the time.

Helter Skelter is currently making the film festival circuit at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco (July 27 - August 4, 2013), and New York’s JAPAN CUTS film fest (July 11 - 21, 2013). The original manga will be released by Vertical publishing in August, 2013.

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