Hey Folks, Harry here and this movie sounds FANTASTIC in a very creepy "I didn't just see what I thought I saw did I?" kinda way! The Lovely Elaine has once again found a film that all of us 'round the world should seek out and enjoy... so sit back, use your down arrow... and learn...
AUDITION (Japan, 1999)
We’ve all got our prejudices about Japanese women. Yours in all likelihood centre on high-pitched voices, innocent smiles, and a passion for Tamagotchi-type stuff. Mine are coloured by a former roommate who sang nursery rhymes to a screensaver bird called Fifi, and by a Japanese girl band who drooled over a boy who was good at archery (“hihi haha hohoho, he’s the coolest boy, HA!”). It doesn’t matter much which aspect of Japanese femininity one focuses on, though. In the end, it all boils down to the same: Japanese women are silly, and anyone sexually attracted to them must be out of his mind.
So the question is, what are those 65 million Japanese men thinking?
That, essentially, is the issue addressed in Audition, Takashi Miike’s seventh film, which has garnered a bit of a reputation in the festival scene for being gruesome in a nasty, acupuncture-needles-and-piano-wires kind of way. In actual fact the film isn’t that gross. Sure, it has a handful of uncomfortable, Misery-like moments, but it is by no means the disgusting horror slasher rumours would have you believe it is. It’s just creepy and disturbing, and an astute analysis of the sexual fears that haunt Japanese men.
Japanese men and their sexual fears. If I were ever to write a non-fiction book, it would be about Japanese men and their ideas on love, sex and relationships. The introduction would be about their cruelty, best witnessed in such TV programmes as the Japanese version of Candid Camera. The rest of the book would be devoted to their sexual preferences. To their passion for uniformed school girls, which seems to take on more worrisome proportions each year. To their habit of paying twelve-year-olds for the right to smell their worn knickers. To their lying flat on their stomachs to film girls utilising squat toilets, afterwards exchanging tapes with fellow disturbees. To the premium they put on innocence and childlikeness in women, meanwhile adoring the dark, disturbed dominatrix-type women who star in Japanese porn flicks. To their twisted fantasies about women in general, which make that old, western “whore-versus-madonna” dichotomy look positively innocent. And to the deceptiveness of first impressions, by which Asian people set such store.
Male fantasies about women and first impressions - that is, in a nutshell, what Audition is about. The fantasies and the impressions are sick; so, therefore, is the film.
It takes a while before the film gets to the sick part. At the outset, Audition appears to be a good old-fashioned family drama, focusing on a widower’s relationship with his teenage son. There is nothing unusual about this part of the film except that the relationship between Aoyama and his son is rather warmer and more caring than the average Japanese father-son relationship. Then the widower gets tired of being lonely, and, egged on by his son, who is beginning to experiment with women himself, sets out to find himself a wife, preferably a traditional one with a good education. It so happens that a friend of his, Yoshikawa, is making a film about “an employer, his secretary and a retard.” Wishing to help Aoyama, Yoshikawa invites him to sit in on the audition for the part of the secretary, to see if he might be interested in any of the actresses. One grotesque candidate follows the other, and in the end Aoyama takes a fancy to a shy-looking girl named Asami. They go out a few times and the attraction appears to be mutual. Then Asami suddenly disappears. In an effort to find her, Aoyama starts digging in Asami's past, unearthing a few alarming facts along the way. Putting the pieces together, he finds himself trapped in a nightmare of sadism, mutilation and near-psychedelic fantasies about Asami, his secretary and a retard of sorts.
Oh, and a uniform-wearing school girl, obviously.
Miike is a master of many genres. In his previous films, he dealt with subjects such as porn and the yakuza; in Audition he dextrously juggles with family drama, psycho thrillers, paranoia and the opportunities afforded by that great cinematic invention, the film-within-a-film. The mixing up of genres is very effective. For most of the first half, the film is calm and relatively uneventful. Except for a close-up of a gutted fish, Yoshikawa’s summing up filmmaking as “a survival game - a torture game” and a few remarks by Asami to the effect that “words hurt, but pain you can trust,” there is nothing to suggest that this will turn into a horror story. Then, suddenly, the atmosphere changes, and all it takes is a smile - a single smile by that fragile-looking waif, Asami.
Picture the scene. Asami sits by the telephone, waiting for Aoyama to ring her. One cannot see her eyes, but the tension in her shoulders indicates she is waiting intently. Then cut to Aoyama, not sure whether he ought to call or not. Desire prevails, and he makes for the telephone. Cut back to Asami, still sitting by the phone with her hair hiding her eyes. The phone rings. The corners of Asami’s mouth go up to form a smile so indescribably wicked it promises blood-curdling things.
Cue lots, lots of nervous giggling.
The smile only lasts a second, but it completely alters the mood of the film. Up until that point, there are a few chortles about the silliness of Japanese women (more particularly the women auditioning for Yoshikawa’s film); after the smile, there is only nervous laughter. The sort of laughter suggested by nice girls talking about their “dark sides” and delicious lines such as “when they’d done assembling the pieces, they came to the conclusion they had a foot and a tongue too many.”
Japanese films. Gotta love ’em.
To be fair, Asami’s smile isn’t the only thing that gives the second half of the film its unsettling flavour. Much of the power of the final half lies with Hideo Yamamoto’s (Hana-Bi) cinematography, which brilliantly echoes the development of the increasingly paranoid plot. After a slow first hour of long, simple shots, the film turns into a showcase of quick montages, powerful close-ups, trippy flashbacks and schizophrenia-inducing colours. Suspense is maintained right until the disturbing end, from which the only thing missing is an ice pick.
The actors ably assist the director and the cinematographer in their effort to wrong-foot the audience. Renji Ishibashi is convincingly ambiguous as Aoyama, the friendly father figure who may or may not have a dirty mind. Miyuki Matsuda and Ryo Ishibashi turn in fine performances as his enigmatic secretary and happy-go-lucky son, respectively. But it is newcomer Eihi Shiina (Japan’s answer to the super model phenomenon) who stands out as Asami, whose frail frame and repressed body language may or may not hide a terror soon to be unleashed. Shiina looks as good in black leather as she does in pristine white, and that smile... well, better forget about the smile.
Audition is currently being released in cinemas in several European countries, and is allegedly out on video in Asia. If you have a chance, watch it. Just don’t expect to feel the same way about boy-girl relationships afterwards.
Or about Japanese women, for that matter.
Elaine
