Harry here with a film that sounds all at once refreshing, bizarre, strange, hypnotic and off kilter enough to be on my DVD SHELVES and that I wish I could see soon in a theater full of Alamo Neils... Well enough of me, here's the story on THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS
This is Joe Slutt. For once, I am absolutely positive that this is cool news.
Last week I reported from the MIFED film market and mentioned that one of the many films showing there was Takashi Miike's most recent directorial outing, which at the time was known as 'Horror Musical.' This film has since been re-christened 'The Happiness of the Katakuris' by its Japanese distributor, Shochiko. The shuffling of titles is not surprising in that the film is frequently referred to as 'Untitled Takashi Miike Project' in many of the recently issued press materials that I referenced when writing this review.
Miike is primarily known to western audiences for his hypnotic and gut-wrenching psychological thriller 'Audition.' While that grim and deliberately paced effort brought the director to international prominence, it may not prepare prospective viewers for the dizzying cavalcade of romantic whimsy and hyper-pantomimed tomfoolery that is on display in his new work. Supposedly a remake of the animated Korean comedy 'Quiet Family,' 'The Happiness of the Katakuris' is a majestically conceived musical about a happy-go-lucky family that is confronted with the unpleasantries of dismemberment and how they find a new sense of togetherness and lust for life in the process.
Masao Katakuri, as played by Kenji Sawada, is an embittered husband and father of two who falls from his authoritarian perch after losing his job as a shoe salesman. He speculatively invests in a dilapidated bed-and-breakfast resort in the countryside, seeking to regain his status as a breadwinner and looking to reconnect with his family. The Katakuris grudgingly support him in this venture but are soon confronted with a bizarre series of events that threaten to undermine this already dysfunctional clan.
After a ghostly transvestite pop-star appears on the family's television and seemingly triggers a power outage, a lonely lodger clad only in a bath-towel mysteriously appears on their doorstep in search of a room. Little do the Katakuris realize that he is simply looking for a moment of solitude before committing suicide, which he does only after verbalizing his feelings of loneliness in the first of the film's many musical numbers.
Terrified of the publicity that would greet such a violent act of desperation, the family decides that the only sensible thing to do is to bury his corpse in the backyard and resume their day-to-day routine. Business begins to flourish, but circumstance strikes once again when a lusty sumo wrestler dies of physical exhaustion while copulating with a schoolgirl in one of their rented rooms. To make matters worse, the nubile object of the wrestler's affections also expires after being suffocated underneath his cellulite and they are both quickly escorted into another unmarked lot in the backyard.
In an extraordinary shift in tone and content, the film pauses to explore the doe-eyed longings of Shizue Katakuri (Naomi Nishida), the eldest daughter of the family. Shizue finds first love in the form of a sea-faring member of the Britain Royal Navy who serenades her to the Konga beat of an intensely choreographed musical number that would bring Jacques Demy out of his grave to greet Miike with a standing ovation. In one of the many loony set pieces that chronicle their courtship, the director even treats the audience to an interactive karaoke intermission so that we can sing along with the happy couple.
While this blast of unabashed romanticism may be unexpected from a director who is so closely associated with reveling in the baser elements of humanity, it is also recognizably within the scope of his uniquely intuitive storytelling process where dreams within realities within flashbacks often comprise the majority of the narrative. Even if it all sometimes feels like spectacle for spectacle's sake, it is nevertheless breathtaking to watch Miike re-appropriate a virtual shopping list of genre conventions as his own. He even lurches into clay-animated interludes to visualize some of the more fantastic elements of the story's imagery, such as a prologue involving one young woman's unforgettable relationship with a creature she finds in a bowl of soup.
If there is one moral to this kaleidoscope of insanity, it is sung by a chorus of characters near the close of the film: "let's live to laugh and dance." It's a welcome sentiment to hear and one that is presented with such earnest fanfare that only the crankiest moviegoer could resist it. Takashi Miike's film may draw comparisons with such recent genre-twisting and mind-scrambling efforts as 'Mulholland Drive' and 'Waking Life,' but it certainly deserves its place among them as one of the best films of 2001.
Click below to find an excellent Midnight Eye behind-the-scenes photo essay documenting the production of "The Happiness of the Katakuris":
