Dry Ice Factory

Japanese 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!

Third time's a charmer.

Chûgoku no chôjin/The Bird People in China is the third Takashi Miike movie I've seen. Whereas Zebraman (2004) and Yôkai daisensô/The Great Yokai War (2005) are both hommages/parodies and overtly, sometimes manically, fantastical, Bird People, while no less magical, is more oblique, ambiguous, and naturalistic in its approach. It's about a Japanese salaryman who is sent by his company to a remote village in mountainous China to investigate rumors of a vein of high quality jade. He is joined on the journey by a yakuza thug who has been sent to collect the debt the company owes his mob family.

It is a journey from hectic civilization to a quiet bucolic paradise that is ripe for exploitation. It is a journey of the soul for both the salaryman and the yakuza. There is a legend in the village that the people there used to be able to fly, and there is a young woman who is trying to teach the children to fly with wings made of wood ribbing and cloth. The yakuza becomes fascinated by the idea, and the salaryman becomes fascinated by the young woman and the Scottish ballad that she learned from her dead grandfather, who fell into the village out of the sky.

It's very funny and sweet and moving. While the image on the Artmagic DVD is not of the highest quality, the imagery of the film is still very beautiful, with many shots of mist-shrouded crags and lush green hillsides and swollen brown rivers. It is very much a character study of the handsome, blank, restrained salaryman and the tormented, fierce, playful yakuza, and the acting is excellent. The ending and the final image are perfect, reminiscent in some ways of the bittersweet nostalgic finale of The Great Yokai War.

This Miike guy really is good. I'm still tiptoeing around the hyperviolent stuff, but it looks like there's more to explore. I just ordered Rainy Dog (1997) and The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001). The latter is described by one commenter on IMDb as "the best horror/comedy/musical/clay-mation/live action/drama/romance/anti-romance/thriller I have yet to come by." Okay!

I really need to watch Zebraman (2004) again before writing about it, but I do want to say that by the end I was laughing hysterically and crying shamelessly at the same time. A commenter at IMDb said they were in a similar state. This Takashi Miike guy knows how to make a postmodern pisstake with genuine heart. If you are a fan of the costumed superhero genre, you should see this movie. If you are a teenager, you should see this movie. If you are me, you should watch it again, as soon as possible.