The counterbalancing theme is water. It pours, cascades, drips, splashes, pools and roars through A Snake of June. It's a metaphor for sexuality, the unstoppable pervasiveness of desire. In nearly every outdoor shot, it's raining. Windows are always being spattered with it. Clothes are soaked in it; faces and bodies spotted. There is a repeated shot of water racing like a torrent across stones to a storm drain, collecting in a strange, Lynchian place in the bowels of the city.
Another repeated motif is a constant use of the shadows of water running in rivulets down windows, those shadows falling on the walls behind and above the characters, to imply the repressed desire flowing through them, unceasingly running but only a hint of what could be.
There are a lot of beautiful shots of water hitting various things. Hydrangeas opening to rainfall; a snail slowly crossing a rain-spattered leaf; a rain-shrouded skyline; windows and walkways splashed with rain; public streets viewed through a haze of rain; and one genuinely wondrous shot of a rain puddle boiling with raindrops, it's whole surface alive with motion. Tsukamoto manages to combine it all with a shot I want to capture for a computer wallpaper: we see Rinko looking apprehensively out her apartment window, through the horizontal slats of open blinds, partly hidden by the angular leaves and limbs of a tree, obscured by heavy rainfall. Alienation, repression, fear and desire all in one aching image.
But this is a Shinya Tsukamoto film. His work has been compared to that of David Lynch and David Cronenberg with good reason. Viewers expect a certain weirdness from the man who brought the body-horror nightmares of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo: Body Hammer to life. With Lynch, he shares a similar view of the strangeness lurking just below the surfaces of seemingly normal life, though this movie gets comparisons to the directly weird Eraserhead. With Cronenberg he shares the same fascination with flesh and the body, the limits it can be put through, the fusion of flesh and machine. Though it's primarily a drama with overtones of psychological horror, there are a few moments of trademark Tsukamoto.
At two points in the movie, Shigehiko finds himself in a Lynchian underworld where businessmen such as himself are bound and their faces covered in intricate pig-snout cones that limit their view to tiny circles in front of them. These sarariman are forced at one moment to watch a young couple being pushed and shoved in a simulation of sex, as a fat woman in a vaguely circuslike costume bangs a drum. The couple are then put into a front-loader washing machine-like device that is equal parts carnival sideshow and cathedral altar, that fills up with water from the drains above, drowning them. Later, at his dramatic turning point, Shigehiko discovers himself inside the machine, also drowning in water from the streets, being watched by the cone-faced businessmen. Whatever is going on here is entirely metaphorical; it's not even clear he's actually in a real place. In a movie as firmly realistic as this, they are flights of absurdity that somehow still feel proper.
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