Sex and nudity abound in Antiporno (2016), but just as its straight-to-the-point title would imply, neither is ever presented in a way that suggests it’s trying to titillate. Written and directed by the iconoclastic Sion Sono, it’s about an egotistical writer and artist, Kyōko (Ami Tomite), and the fraught relationships she has not just with fame and sex but also her ever-obedient assistant, Noriko (Mariko Tsutsui), who fields constant sexual harassment and garden-variety humiliation from her boss. 

Or maybe Antiporno isn’t about that. We get only a few minutes into the film when it’s revealed that the duo is playing characters on a porn shoot. The actresses are the opposite of the women they play. The Tomite character is an introverted newcomer who second-guesses everything she does. The Tsutsui character is a seen-it-all veteran who has no patience for the insecurities of her newbie co-star. (“I can end you any time I’d like,” she seethes.) But once we’ve adjusted to this new reality, Antiporno only keeps blurring lines between what’s really going on and what isn’t, its distant relationship to trustworthy reality heightened by the dollhouse look of the apartment where most of the action takes place. The bedroom is basically a yellow cube, the bathroom similarly monochromatic but red. Its limited-setting claustrophobia and frustrated women characters put me in mind of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). 

The through line in all of Antiporno’s scenarios is an underlying frustration with how difficult it is for women to be truly free — especially when it comes to sexual expression — both in the film industry and life writ large under patriarchy. Its convictions are more admirable when considering how the movie came to be in the first place. Nikkatsu, one of the production companies responsible for Antiporno’s making, had in the 1970s pivoted to mostly making soft-core projects it termed “roman pornos,” which required sex or nudity every 10 minutes. In the mid-2010s, the atonement-minded studio commissioned a crop of vogue filmmakers to make their own versions of the bygone subgenre, the results varying from more accessible homages to unwieldy turns. Antiporno, unquestionably among the latter, feels like the equivalent of an eye roll or middle finger, though one senses that Sono is well-aware that, in employing some of the tropes he’s himself critiquing, he’s in some ways complicit in a system for which he has contempt.

The movie is so shake-your-shoulders abrasive — palpably, and also rather surrealistically, angry — that its 76-minute runtime feels longer than it is. (Contributing to its rather bludgeoning quality is how much Tomite is required to practically screech her sometimes overliteral lines of dialogue.) But this audacious, stylish rebuke is always easy to respect as a coarse means of interrogation — the kind of confident big swing there ought to be more of in movies.