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Features
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Gozu's Wacky Auteur
Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike takes part in his first U.S. publicity tour and leaves no doubt he is a man who could uncork some sixty very odd films.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
By Brett Buckalew
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When it comes to grotesque surrealism in contemporary North American film, directors David Lynch (from the U.S.) and David Cronenberg (Canada-based) have the market cornered.
While there are key differences between the two filmmakers - Lynch is typically more fond of loopy, deadpan humor, whereas Cronenberg usually gravitates toward the grim and grimy - they are united in their fascination with cinematic representations of the subconscious. Further connecting them is their similar ability to plumb disturbing psychosexual depths. To watch Lynch’s Blue Velvet or Cronenberg’s Crash is to understand how both filmmakers, through the use of extremely obtuse symbolism, can eerily capture the way in which the human mind doesn’t really separate violence and sex.
Whether or not the existence of Japanese shock-cinema auteur Takashi Miike says anything in general about the divide between Japan’s film culture and our own, this much can be said in more specific terms: his films make the entire cinematic output of Lynch and Cronenberg look timid, watered-down, and conventional by comparison.
As icky as those two directors can be, they’ve never had characters burst into musical numbers where the lyrics focus on death, as Miike did in his 2001 release The Happiness of the Katakuris. They’ve never ended a meditative romance with an extended, bloody torture scene, which Miike did in his most popular film to date, 2000’s Audition. And certainly neither Lynch nor Cronenberg can claim to have explored the sexual pleasures of lactation not once but twice (!), as Miike has in 2002’s Visitor Q and the current theatrical release Gozu.
When preparing to interview Miike recently in Beverly Hills, a stop on his first-ever publicity tour of the U.S., one can’t help but expect him to be quite creepy, and, sure enough, some of his digressions sound scarily perverse, even when filtered into English through a kind female translator.
For example, when asked about how women are portrayed in his films, Miike replies, “Women are mysterious to me. They’re not a subject that I really understand, so, in a way, I have two choices to [depict] female characters - either with violence [being done to them], or to show them as being mysterious.”
Luckily, though, any temptation to write off Miike as hopelessly cuckoo is immediately resisted when one succumbs to the oddly beautiful formal precision and exhilarating flights of imagination contained in his intriguing body of work.
Gozu, now playing in New York and Los Angeles, is no exception. With impressive control over composition and pacing, Miike tells the slowly unfolding story of Minami (Hideki Sone), a member of the Yakuza who accidentally kills his mentor, Ozaki (Sho Aikawa). When Minami loses Ozaki’s dead body while stopping at a small-town gas station, he has to search through the town’s café, motel, and rice shop for the corpse, but each stop on his journey gets progressively weirder. Everyone he questions seems too hung up on their own obsessions to really understand what he’s saying.
To give away more of the plot would be to ruin some of its more amusingly garish twists, but suffice to say it involves the appearance of the titular figure of the ‘gozu’ (a creature with a human’s body and a cow’s head), unexplained gender-switching, one of the most graphic representations of re-birth ever put on screen, and creative use of soup ladles. It’s enough to please any fan of Miike’s world, or just anyone who likes twisted but elegant horror-comedy art.
According to Miike, though, American viewers who fit into either of those categories almost didn’t get a chance to see Gozu theatrically. The film was never intended to hit the big screen, until it was accepted into an out-of-competition slot at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“Gozu was made only as a DVD and video title in Japan, but the producer [Harumi Sone] said, ‘Maybe we should just to try to apply for Cannes,’” Miike recalls. “Everything kind of started that way.”
The filmmaker credits the enthusiastic response from the 2003 Cannes Film Festival premiere for helping to secure interest from American theatrical distributors (indie companies Pathfinder and Klockworx are behind the U.S. release), but he is also quick to support the straight-to-video route of making a movie.
“In a way, when I make a film for straight-to-video, I have more freedom to create, and it doesn’t really stop me and force me to make something I don’t want to,” explains Miike. “It actually gives me more freedom. So I really like the way [Gozu] doesn’t have to be released in Japan theatrically, but it could be released theatrically in foreign countries.”
Because Miike relishes his creative freedom, he dreads the idea of coming Stateside to make a film within the Hollywood studio system. “I really believe that the Hollywood system doesn’t apply to the way I make movies in Japan,” he admits.
“I also believe that, in the process of editing, it’s very important for the director to have complete control over the editing,” he adds. “So, under the Hollywood system, it would be hard for me to do things the way I want to do them.”
| While such an assertion of independence could be a sign of artistic integrity to some, or of reckless arrogance to others, there’s no disputing the humility Miike reveals when he’s asked about the theme of family that courses through his work (even Gozu, written by previous Miike collaborator Sakichi Sato, imagines the Yakuza as a kind of family).
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“Whenever I come up with ideas - talking about family, for example - it’s more like I bring them up to discuss with the producer,” the director clarifies. “We talk about those kinds of things, but I never try to have some ‘theme.’ It’s more about chatting with other people who are working on the film.”
“[The idea of family] was in my mind, and it somehow came up, but I never really try to push the idea into this film, or into any other film I make.”
As for the other central themes of Gozu, Miike wants to leave it up to the audience to sort out what the movie is really about. “In the film, I try not to give any kind of clear idea about the characters - who they are, why they are, why they are doing what they do,” Miike elaborates.
“I just wanted a vagueness. I wanted to leave it to the audience to figure out why everything happened [in the story] the way it happened.”
| Getting a little more direct about the meaning of his film, Miike adds, “most of the characters in the film are provided with a profession - a clerk at the rice shop, a member of the Yakuza - but it doesn’t really tell you why they are existing, or who they are. So I wanted [the film] to feel, in a way, like your daily life.”
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Ironically, if Gozu has a failing, it’s that all of its dazzling wackiness feels a little too removed from daily life to carry much emotional resonance. But even if Miike hasn’t made his own Mulholland Drive or Naked Lunch - films that proved Lynch and Cronenberg, respectively, to be as mature as they are bizarre - it’s bound to be a fascinating journey to watch him keep trying to extend his reach. As long as you have the stomach for it, that is.
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