Where Shin’ya Tsukamoto pulled Japan’s industrial guts out and gave them horrid new life, Sion Sono dove in to the same viscera and lit a cigarette. Ballardian ennui and Garrellian textured stillness, Sono bites his thumb at the idea of precious pretension as a way to critique modernity. The heroes of 1993’s The Room—a man dressed like a detective, a woman trying to sell him an apartment—speak around each other, trying and failing to re-code the other’s linguistic pattern. Sono snickers at…
