Saw Miike’s Audition the other day. Definitely sadistic–not least to the audience–and definitely voyeuristic. But is there anything else there? Is it Oleanna as envisioned by Dario Argento? Does it have anything valuable to say about, well, anything? Or is it just a bit of splatter oneupsmanship?
Discuss.
Hm. Nobody seen it? That surprises me. Since I wrote this OP, I’ve read a few reviews. It’s more critically respected than I’d expected; haven’t yet found much backlash. Anyone think it’s gratuitous? Or do we all think, like Elvis Mitchell, that it “earns” its horror? A friend tells me he thinks it was a mistake to give the girl such a specific history; supplies a ready scapegoat for her actions in the dance teacher, rather than lets her retain the mystery of the anonymous avenger of the wronged woman. Not sure I agree; the character’s specificity still leaves room for her to be a stand-in for womankind: her pain at being used and objectified is universal; only her means of revenge is specific.
Seriously – spoilers. Don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.
Which
you
should.
I’ll take your side – I think leaving her an anonymous avenger would make the film guilty of the attitude it’s criticizing. As a cipher, she’s objectified; as a character, she’s humanized, and part of being human is the ability to be monstrous.
(Don’t you think the movie would work better, by the way, with less spoileriffic cover art? There are very few hints in the first half of what’s to come, but the box cover gives a bit too much of the game away.)
Also, I don’t remember the last film that made me jump as much as the first real hint of what’s to come, when she’s sitting in her apartment, the phone rings, the bag moves and she smiles.
Yah, re box art. Luckily I got it from netflix: no art. And I’d only heard that it was disturbing, nothing specific.
Still not sure if the audience DESERVES the punishment Miike inflicts on us, whereas I totally agree with Von Trier’s audience bludgeoning in Dancer in the Dark. Von Trier’s hostility was directed specifically at moviegoers, so every individual in the theater was guilty of the crime he was punishing us for. Not so with Audition, whose target is male objectification of women, right? Do women watching Audition feel avenged, or are they just as punished as the men?
(Thinking now of Irreversible, which was irresponsible and gratuitous; horror-porn.)
I think it is gratuitous but that is also a very big part of Miike’s style. He has essentially put several genres into one movie here; Romantic Comedy, Mystery, Horror/Gore and done it very effectively indeed.
One of the big deals with Audition is its treatment of women in Japanese society. They are typically viewed as subservient and Miike turns that on its head very effectively.
For me it appears that, as with most of Miike’s films, it was intended to shock on both a psychological and physical level. It does both very effectively imho, and that is something rare, unusual and worth seeing.
I think the cover art somewhat spoils the movie. Before I watched it I knew it was a horror movie but the cover art sort of gives the “twist” away a little. I think it is best viewed by people who know absolutely nothing about the movie at all. I’ve shown it to a couple of friends of mine who were pretty much either pinned to back of sofa, or cowering behind it, in shock.
I should probably add that I’m a huge Takashi Miike fan (I’ve got 7 or 8 of his films on DVD) and he can’t do too much wrong in my opinion. He doesn’t necessarrily tell stories with a huge amount of depth, but he keeps the viewer on the back foot in a way no other director I can think of does.
I enjoyed it. I thought it was darkly humorous.
I’m of two minds on the film. In private communication, I described it as “one of those great movies you never want to see again.”
Something important to consider when looking at Miike’s movies is that he makes between five and ten of them a year. How he manages to do this, I don’t know, but his output is prodigious. Seems to me there’s a subtle but significant difference between somebody like, say, Kubrick, who carefully planned his projects over a number of years and then spent many months shooting and editing them, and Miike, who may spend as little as two or three months on a single project before rushing on to the next one.
So when considering his work, I give a lot of intellectual room to the intuitive-and-unconscious school of interpretation; I just don’t think there’s enough time for him to carefully consider every aspect of what he does. I think he’s a frighteningly gifted film artist who feels as much as knows what makes a powerful story, and what gets under the audience’s skin, and that he proceeds by instinct much of the time.
Obviously, in film criticism, there’s a distinction to be made between “what the artist intends” and “how the audience responds apart from or in addition to what the artist intends,” but the point is, when it comes to Miike, the balance between them is somewhat atypical.
The bottom line: Audition bowled me over, and whether Miike knew exactly what he was doing thematically, or was just fucking with the audience for the sake of fucking with them, or was channeling some subconscious muse he doesn’t analyze too closely, I don’t know. I’m curious to see how the thread develops.
I have three of his others on the way to me from Netflix, so perhaps I’ll have a better handle on him when I’ve given them a look. I’m not afraid to admit I’m trepidatious: like I’m expecting bombs in my mailbox.
Are films like this, and Irreversible, and most of Von Trier, an indication of a certain jadedness in cinema? I mean, a jadedness that these directors feel a need to shake up like a British nanny?
I feel like Von Trier is very specifically working with that jadedness uppermost in his mind; but is it real? are we mired in a kind of cinematic rut that will require a few film terrorists to get the medium awake and moving again?
If that’s the case, is the gratuitousness of such films even relevant? In the wake of these films, I view the future of world cinema with a mixture of excitement and dread.
Yeah, what Cervaise said too.
His movies do tend to veer all of the map as far as quality is concerned, but I have a sense that is due to the sheer volume of movies he makes as much as anything.
One of the things I’ve noticed he shows no fear at all in shooting a movie the way he wants. I suspect this is a combination of shooting on a limited budget and the liberal attitude of the Japanese government toward cinematic violence. I’ve noticed that depending on where you buy the movie, you can end up with substantially different versions of the film because of censorship.
[Pet Peeve = On]
I’ve yet to see one of his movies available in the UK which hasn’t been edited for violent content
[Pet Peeve = Off]
At heart I think he is an auteur who makes movies to please himself as much as anyone else. He frequently return to themes of ethnic integration (all of his Yaskuza movies deal with this in one way or another) and I read in a interview that he doesn’t make any distinction between love, sex and violence. These themes not only run through his movies, but often are together in a single scene which can make for uncomfortable viewing at times ( especially in Ichi The Killer).
Slight highjack - has anyone else seen Visitor Q yet?
Yeah, what Cervaise said too.
His movies do tend to veer all over the map as far as quality is concerned, but I have a sense that is due to the sheer volume of movies he makes as much as anything.
One of the things I’ve noticed he shows no fear at all in shooting a movie the way he wants. I suspect this is a combination of shooting on a limited budget and the liberal attitude of the Japanese government toward cinematic violence. I’ve noticed that depending on where you buy the movie, you can end up with substantially different versions of the film because of censorship.
[Pet Peeve = On]
I’ve yet to see one of his movies available in the UK which hasn’t been edited for violent content
[Pet Peeve = Off]
At heart I think he is an auteur who makes movies to please himself as much as anyone else. He frequently return to themes of ethnic integration (all of his Yaskuza movies deal with this in one way or another) and I read in a interview that he doesn’t make any distinction between love, sex and violence. These themes not only run through his movies, but often are together in a single scene which can make for uncomfortable viewing at times ( especially in Ichi The Killer).
Slight highjack - has anyone else seen Visitor Q yet?
Another thought: the title refers more to her choice of him as her next victim than to his search for a wife.
Best movie I’ve ever seen where a guy rapes a dead woman and she shits all over him.
MrS, that’s what we call a spoiler. It’s considered polite in these parts to include such an oversharing of a film’s or a book’s storyline within [**spoiler]___[/spoiler] brackets.
Don’t worry, it’s really not essential to the plot.
Watched *The Happiness of the Katakouris* last night. Quite a different movie. It has its gore, but on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being The Care Bears movie and 10 being Audition, it’s a 2.
Took a while to find its pace, but the ending was so worthwhile that I’m tempted to justify the apparent aimlessness of the beginning as illustrative of the movie’s theme.
Anyone have a comment?
As I said in the horror movie thread, I have requested it from Netflix and put it at the top of my queue. I’ll let you know my opinion after I watch. And thanks again for the recommendation.
I thought it was a little slow in places, although certain sequences were riotously funny. When the family finds the first victim and bursts into song and dance to a rock song, I was rolling around on the floor. Not one of his best movies, but it again shows he makes the movies he wants to make rather than following in everyone expectations.
I ordered one of his new movies, Gozu, yesterday so I’ll give that a try and see what I think.
I read somewhere that Gozu is the 9th movie he has released this year. Now that is one seriously prolific director.
I watched City of Lost Souls this weekend. Seriously different from either of his other two that I’ve seen. Great pastiche of gangster cliches, with an entirely fresh-seeming perspective somehow. Great stuff.
I didn’t really enjoy City Of Lost Soulds too much. It explored some common Miike themes (racially integration) but for me the movie just didn’t seem to work too well. As usual, there were some teriffic sequences, but the whole thing just seemed slow and uninspired.
If you like the gangster/yakuza genre, you should try the Dead or Alive trilogy. The first one is especially wonderful and probably his best Yakuza movie.
Redeeming value? Heck, yeah. I love Audition and have seen my DVD at least twenty times already. It’s a severely underappreciated movie, even among those who’ve praised it, because so much of the movie goes unnoticed if you just think of it as a female revenge film.
I love the scene where Aoyama is watching the Japanese punk concert video and the other guy says “The whole of Japan is lonely.” Aoyama says to him “Are you lonely?” and the guy replies “You too, right?”