Logan Moreno
Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s Ballads (1993) lingers in obscurity, as if its very circulation were shaped by the same quiet damage that defines the film itself. What is almost immediately striking about Ballads is how it folds J-horror’s fascination with bodies under pressure and the pinku subgenre’s obsession with desire-turned-dangerous into something emotionally fragile. The erotic scenes are soaked in grief and humiliation, so sex never settles into anything like pleasure. Tomomatsu treats discomfort as his expressive language, and that discomfort lets him get close to the feelings of marginalisation at the film’s center. Grief and anger saturate the sound and image, giving the grain, noise, and erratic pacing a force that makes feelings tangible and hard to shake.
Underneath the apparent chaos of Ballads, Tomomatsu builds a careful emotional and formal logic. Fragmented concert footage, recurring snuff tapes, and flashes of nearly illegible body horror mirror the protagonist’s interior state, showing what it feels like to live as a gay man in a world that refuses to acknowledge your pain and relishes your humiliation. Akihiko Yamamoto, still mourning Hiroshi, the lover he lost in a motorcycle accident, works in a video store that quietly pushes uncensored hardcore pornography under the counter. His grief is written into his body. He walks with a cane, carries visible scars, and those scars are pointed out and handled by his boss during sex, with his injuries turned into convenient proof of weakness and sexual availability. In the early stretches of Ballads, Yamamoto moves like someone whose whole body has learned to expect injury, with grief and subordination folded into his posture and the way he occupies space. Read more
