Trust the Japanese to come up with the most morbid of storylines. Divided into five “chapters”, cult director Sion Sono’s Guilty Of Romance (the third of his Hate trilogy) focuses on two central woman figures: The main character, Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka), subservient to her demanding and seemingly straight-arrow novelist husband (Kanji Tsuda), is just plain bored with the routines of marriage. They agree she could use some distraction, so she takes a job in a supermarket selling sausages (subtlety is obviously lost on the director). After meeting a manipulative procuress on the job, she becomes a nude model for sex films, then begins an affair with her handsome co-star. The floodgates open. This formerly meek woman turns aggressively to prostitution, all the while maintaining her wifely demeanour at home. Izumi becomes an acolyte of Mitsuko (Makoto Togashi), an academic by day and a sexually demented prostitute at night, who maintains that her nocturnal persona “empowers” her. A born cynic, she teaches the naive Izumi the ropes and advises Izumi to have sex only for money while getting her immersed in the gloomy poems of Japan’s famed Tamura Ryuichi. In one of the film’s unexpected build-ups, Mitsuko arranges for an orange-wigged Izumi to take on as a client her own unsuspecting husband. He is obviously as bored with their dead-end marriage as she is. Cue bloodbath in the end. While we’ve seen enough sex-themed Japanese dramas, Guilty of Romance is still mildly interesting for its clever use of poet Ryuichi’s affecting work to lift its central themes of meaningless love and sex. And there’s certainly enough gratuitous nudity (Kagurazaka is quite the looker) to keep viewers entertained. Character development may be a tad abrupt (the film was 143-minutes when it made its Cannes premiere last year, cut down to its current 100), but this is as entertaining as it gets when it comes to torture porn.