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randy_byersJapanese director Takashi Miike is one of the more interesting contemporary directors, and I say that as someone who has seen very few of his over 70 films. Although he's probably still best known for his violent yakuza and horror films, he's always trying something new, from the gentle folkloric fantasy The Bird People in China (1998) to the exploration of the samurai roots of Spaghetti Westerns in Sukyaki Western Django (2007). In Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (the Japanese title is literally "4.6 Billion Year Love"), Miike is in experimental theater mode in what Tom Mes describes as "an overtly homoerotic, Brechtian prison drama whose barely-lit concrete corridors echo whispers of Von Trier and Godard." The DVD package mentions Genet as well, just to give you a further idea of what to expect.
The movie is deliberately disorienting and misleading, with philosophical exposition that raises more questions than it answers. Hard to say what the titular reference to the age of the universe has to do with anything, unless it is to say that the world has been a mystery from the start. What we get in the fractured narrative is the story of two young men who are in prison for committing murder and who end up in a complicated relationship with each other that ends up with one of them apparently murdering the other. But what is the motive? That is the basic question of the movie, and it draws us into deeper and deeper considerations of manhood, sex, violence, and, ultimately, meaning. After a difficult introduction in conflicting modes, the movie settles (somewhat) into a murder mystery, but it still bursts unexpectedly into different modes, such as an anime sequence suggesting that meaning itself is a prison.
The image of masculinity portrayed here is definitely violent and homoerotic, but it's also elusive. The young men in the prison are victims of abusive pasts (and are still being abused in prison in various ways, sexually and otherwise), but amongst other things the shattering of the narrative (which is told in fragments of flashback, repetition, interview, abstraction, fantasy, nightmare, non sequitur) is also a shattering of causation. The men are created by the world they live in, yet different men react differently to the same stimuli. The way that Genet wriggles into this is in the sense that criminal behavior is an exercise of free will as much as anything else. Yet the crime isn't glorified. Everybody is a victim of crime, including the criminals themselves.
Well, I certainly didn't understand it all on one viewing. The murder mystery is solved, but the solution only raises more questions. This one is probably a little bit too spare and bleak to become a favorite, but it certainly keeps me interested in what Miike's up to. However, he's incredibly prolific and has already made nine feature films since Big Bang Love. I probably won't be catching up with all of that any time soon!
The movie is deliberately disorienting and misleading, with philosophical exposition that raises more questions than it answers. Hard to say what the titular reference to the age of the universe has to do with anything, unless it is to say that the world has been a mystery from the start. What we get in the fractured narrative is the story of two young men who are in prison for committing murder and who end up in a complicated relationship with each other that ends up with one of them apparently murdering the other. But what is the motive? That is the basic question of the movie, and it draws us into deeper and deeper considerations of manhood, sex, violence, and, ultimately, meaning. After a difficult introduction in conflicting modes, the movie settles (somewhat) into a murder mystery, but it still bursts unexpectedly into different modes, such as an anime sequence suggesting that meaning itself is a prison.
The image of masculinity portrayed here is definitely violent and homoerotic, but it's also elusive. The young men in the prison are victims of abusive pasts (and are still being abused in prison in various ways, sexually and otherwise), but amongst other things the shattering of the narrative (which is told in fragments of flashback, repetition, interview, abstraction, fantasy, nightmare, non sequitur) is also a shattering of causation. The men are created by the world they live in, yet different men react differently to the same stimuli. The way that Genet wriggles into this is in the sense that criminal behavior is an exercise of free will as much as anything else. Yet the crime isn't glorified. Everybody is a victim of crime, including the criminals themselves.
Well, I certainly didn't understand it all on one viewing. The murder mystery is solved, but the solution only raises more questions. This one is probably a little bit too spare and bleak to become a favorite, but it certainly keeps me interested in what Miike's up to. However, he's incredibly prolific and has already made nine feature films since Big Bang Love. I probably won't be catching up with all of that any time soon!
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Date: 2009-10-20 12:49 am (UTC)And yeah, he makes so many films. It's hard to keep up.
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Date: 2009-10-20 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:37 am (UTC)Also from what I've read, the male lead in Audition is played by the same actor who plays the prison warden in Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. Also a creepy character, actually.
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Date: 2009-10-20 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 02:03 am (UTC)"Did You Really Need That Foot?".
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Date: 2009-10-21 10:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 04:24 pm (UTC)