Takashi Miike's prodigious filmography—60 projects in 13 years, one of the latest of which, Gozu, opens Friday—often returns to sex, violence and macho posturing, commercial cinema's most potent fuel sources. Yet his movies are so odd and personal that it's hard to accuse him of pandering. Gleefully outré works like Ichi the Killer, Salaryman Kintaro, Visitor Q and his 2001 North American breakthrough Audition earned him comparisons to David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino and Luis Buñuel—an inevitable trio, considering that so many Miike films tapdance along the boundary separating "realism" from dreamlike excess. Temperamentally, though, Miike is probably closest to Buñuel, not just because of his surreal tendencies, but because Miike naturally possesses a quality that Buñuel always had, and that the eternal video geek Tarantino and the once-and-future-art-school-student Lynch, in such films as Wild at Heart, can only fake: brute vigor.
Like Buñuel—and fellow exploitation-art darlings Samuel Fuller (The Naked Kiss) and Robert Aldrich (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), for that matter—Miike works with disreputable material. But he takes a more straightforward, simple approach, as if the violence and sick humor were value-neutral elements rather than the most commercial parts of a carefully assembled package. Plus, Miike doesn't italicize every scene, shot and line, à la Tarantino and his imitators, in order to nudge you to applaud his cheekiness. Rather, he presents much of his material matter-of-factly, which makes his films feel authentically strange.
Complicated, too: Of the comparative handful of Miike movies that have found their way to the U.S., it's amazing how many of them reveal new layers if you watch them more than once. One could argue, for instance, that Audition—in which a widower's controlling, often humiliating auditions for a new bride culminate in one of the most intense torture-as-payback sequences in cinema history—was wrongly promoted in this country as a psychosexual horror picture or the latest in art-house sadism. The film has those qualities. But it could also be viewed as a dream/fantasy/nightmare—a film in which the events that so alarmed audiences did not happen in the usual prosaic sense, but only "happened" in the mind of the widower or the viewer, in much the same way that cannibalism "happened" in Buñuel's very dreamlike Exterminating Angel.
Or then again, maybe not. No matter how often one dissects or explains a Miike film, one remains aware that other, equally valid interpretations are still lurking out there.
Gozu, about a Yakuza wannabe ordered to kill his boss, is one of the most distinctive Miike films yet, not because it's violent and strange (those qualities would hardly merit a newsflash), but because it's such a brazenly deadpan comedy. Originally intended as a direct-to-video movie (the insatiable Miike makes several each year), it has been available for rent in Japan for at least 13 months. Thanks to Miike's growing international reputation, the film ended up in the Director's Fortnight section of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. If you buy a ticket expecting another super-intense Audition or Visitor Q, or a Miike gangster film chock full of Yakuza doublecrosses and brutality, you'll be disappointed. Gozu is more like an NC-17 Japanese version of a Three Stooges two-reeler from the 40s. It keeps the gags coming, piling absurdity upon absurdity while depicting each one as if it were no big deal.
Written by Sakichi Sato (Ichi the Killer), and cast with many members of Miike's unofficial stock company, Gozu begins with a scene so demented it almost seems to be making fun of art-film brutality. During a Yakuza meeting at a restaurant, an unstable gangster named Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) spies a tiny yapping dog outside, warns his anxious underling, Minami (Hideki Sone) that the animal is clearly an assassin, then rushes outside and beats the pooch to death. As seen through the plate-glass window of the restaurant, Ozaki's movements suggest the apeman from 2001 going nuts with a bone club.
Everyone in the gang knows Ozaki has lost his marbles, and it's only a matter of time before they have to whack him. Soon enough, Minami finds himself driving the paranoid Ozaki to a dump (actually a body-disposal site) where he is expected to prove his loyalty to the gang by disposing of Ozaki. Ozaki dies accidentally (sweet relief!), but the freaked-out Minami still manages to lose the body outside a diner—or did the body leave on its own? This is Miike, so we cannot be sure.
I'll be slightly less specific now, because I don't want to ruin Miike and Sato's inexplicable yet inevitable series of events. Suffice it to say that when describing Gozu, the phrase "dream logic" doesn't quite do the trick. What's on display here is more like daydream logic, the kind of free association that results when one settles on a particular storyline, then consciously tries to see how ridiculous one can make it. Here, at least, the results are marvelous—so distinctive that the film transcends the sum of its obvious influences, and so much fun that it's hard to be too offended or startled by the deranged stuff. The scene in the diner in which our meek hero realizes he's lost the body might remind you of Hitchcock and De Palma's thumbscrew-tightening sense of humor (note the possibly insane man repeating the same three sentences over and over), and a subsequent sequence depicting sexual harassment by a monster with a penile tongue draws on the Lynch/Buñuel tradition of Freudian sight gags.
But in both cases, the poker-faced tone (just the facts, people!) is unique to Miike. It's part of what makes his strangest and most intense films tolerable, even fascinating, to viewers who normally have little interest in transgression and other semiotic buzzwords. Even the most grotesque sights—including an old Yakuza boss simultaneously yelling at Minami on the phone and screwing a young woman while a soup ladle hangs out of his bung hole, handle-first—seem less than revolting because Miike depicts them all with an implied shrug, as if to say, "You see what this guy likes. What are you into?"
The vibe will be familiar to anybody who's seen other Miike films, even more obviously dark, intense pictures like Audition. There's something playfully unstable about his films. Trying to get a fix on them is like trying to run barefoot up a sand dune; the ground is solid, yet it keeps giving way. Is Miike a demented obsessive or a prankster? Is he kidding or not? He won't say for sure. Artists rarely do.
JU-ON (THE GRUDGE) The Japanese are making the best horror movies in the world right now, so good that even the Japanese horror movies that are just okay do a better job of giving one the creeps than most Hollywood horror films. The difference, I think, lies in Japanese filmmakers' attention to physical space, including ambient sound. In such diverse films as The Ring, Uzumaki and last summer's Japan-influenced The Eye by Thailand's Pang brothers, you can lose yourself in comparatively small, familiar spaces—hallways, parking garages, apartments, elevators—and be terrified not by the actual appearance of evil, but merely by the possibility of its presence.
Descended from a seemingly endless line of Japanese films (the first of which was a tv movie), The Grudge is slightly more quaint and low-tech than American horror buffs are probably used to. But it's still sensationally effective in places, and anybody who tells you they weren't creeped out by any of it is almost certainly lying.
Written and directed by Takashi Shimizu, it's an odd work that's hard to categorize: a straight-up, gooseflesh-raising horror picture that's also an anthology of ghost stories connected, somewhat obliquely, to an horrendous domestic killing in an apartment. The movie depicts a vengeful spirit's grudge as a curse that expands outward, destroying seemingly unrelated lives; the evil manifests itself in many forms, from fairly straightforward apparitions to a pitch-black, soul-sucking demon whose appearance suggests a huge burn mark on the projector screen.
The Grudge isn't a thesis to be argued over, though. It's a creepshow that wrings great tension from the most basic filmmaking tools, including spooky sound effects, suggestive camera moves and cleverly arranged shadows—which is why Shimizu's decision to let us get a good look at the ghost in the film's final chapter seems a rather puzzling tactical mistake. Like John Carpenter's early movies—or Spielberg's terrorizing a nation with a rubber shark fin in Jaws—the first four-fifths of The Grudge amount to an object lesson in how much one can do with a little. After it was over, I saw three teenaged boys standing outside the theater complaining that the movie just wasn't scary at all. Thirty minutes earlier, they were sitting right behind me, shrieking like babies. o
