DIRECTOR
Takashi
Miike
SCREENWRITER
Daisuke
Tengan
based
on the novel by
Ryu
Murakami
PRODUCERS
Satoshi Fukushima
Akemi Suyama
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Hideo Yamamoto
MUSIC
Kôji Endô
EDITOR
Yasushi Shimamura
CAST
Ryo Ishibashi (Shigeharu Aoyama)
Eihi Shiina (Asami Yamazaki)
Tetsu Sawaki (Shigehiko Aoyama)
Jun Kunimura (Yasuhisa Yoshikawa)
Renji Ishibashi (Old Man in Wheelchair)
Miyuki Matsuda (Ryoko Aoyama)
Toshie Negishi (Rie)
MPAA rating: R or unrated
Running
time: 115m
Japanese
release: March 3, 2000
U.S. release: August 8, 2001
Video availability: VHS - DVD
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You should probably go into
Takashi Miike's Audition as blank as possible, though,
as with Psycho, you can enjoy it even if you know where
it's going. Hell, the marketing spoils any big surprises it has
(if you catch this on DVD and have a habit of watching the trailer
for the movie before the movie itself, do not do that
with Audition; the enclosed two trailers give away quite
a few shocks that need to be experienced virginally and in context
to retain their full oomph). But, like a lot of people who've
seen Audition, I have a sadistic little daydream of showing
it to clueless friends who've never heard of it. I wouldn't show
them the DVD cover art; I would even make them stay out of the
room until the film was in play mode, so they wouldn't even see
the menu. Then they'd watch the movie and take it for
a sensitive Japanese drama about a widower looking for companionship
-- up until the halfway mark, anyway. They would have no idea
what they were in for. Of course, the daydream realistically
ends with my shocked and disgusted friends throwing me out of
their living room by the scruff of my neck, so perhaps it should
stay a daydream.
Those who have heard
of Audition -- and it's far from the only film in the
insanely prolific Takashi Miike's portfolio, but it is likely
the most notorious -- may, conversely, go into it expecting more
than they'll get. The first hour is becalmed (deceptively
becalmed, of course), normal, mainstream -- it's television.
It begins rather sentimentally, in a hospital room. Shigeharu
Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is watching his wife slip away on her
deathbed. Their young son, meanwhile, is walking towards the
room with a homemade "Get Well Soon, Mom" gift in his
hands. By the time he gets there, she has flatlined. The father
and son leave the hospital together in quiet grief. Cut to seven
years later. Aoyama and his now-teenage son Shigehiko (Tetsu
Sawaki) are fishing. They have an easy, comfortable relationship
-- we see that Aoyama has raised his son alone (with the help
of his maid Rie, played by Toshie Negishi) and done a serviceable
job; the kid turned out okay, with a possible girlfriend and
an unquenchable passion for dinosaurs (which may suggest that
in a lot of ways, the son hasn't matured a lot since his
mom's death).
Aoyama, a production executive,
is mostly content but vaguely lonely. His son tells him that
he should remarry before he gets any older (he is perhaps in
his mid-forties); his colleague and friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura)
seconds this, and proposes a plan for Aoyama to meet the perfect
woman -- i.e., "beautiful, classy, and obedient." They'll
hold an audition for a non-existent movie, analyzing the women
who arrive to try out for the "role," asking questions
relevant to Aoyama's companionship needs. We get a pretty funny
montage of various women sitting for the men and their camera,
sometimes dancing around (a couple even disrobe). Aoyama, however,
has already made up his mind; for him, the audition is almost
a formality to appease Yoshikawa, because while going through
the paper applications, Aoyama has come across a woman whose
story touches his soul. Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) writes about
herself modestly, enclosing an innocent, almost bashful-looking
head shot. She mentions studying ballet for 12 years until a
hip injury ended her dream; facing the reality of her post-ballet
life, she says, was "like accepting death." Aoyama
is hooked. He's hooked even more when her audition shows her
to be a quiet angel in white, even more beautiful than her photo
allows, who doesn't even bother to "act" or be "on"
for this supposed "role." She is simply herself.
Aoyama is in love. Yoshikawa
has his doubts -- he doesn't like her; he can't put his
finger on it, but he muses that it's "something chemical."
But we can dismiss that as the grumblings of a jealous friend.
Aoyama will be happy again after seven years of loneliness. He
and Asami go out a couple of times. Then, around 45 minutes into
the film, comes a quiet and massively creepy moment -- it's one
of the more frightening things I've seen in a movie. Asami sits
in her apartment, on the floor, slumped and with her back to
us; nearby is a phone, and, in the background, a laundry sack.
Cut to Aoyama, debating whether to call Asami. Cut back to Asami:
the phone rings. What follows is so chilling that it completely
and permanently alters our perception of everything afterward.
And everything afterward is
pretty fucking intense. I'm not going to reveal more, except
to say that Takashi Miike, solely on the basis of this one Miike
film I've seen, is an unquestionable master. When he wants to
make Asami look pure and beautiful, you want to hug her and protect
her and make her happy. When he wants to make her look menacing,
you've never seen anything scarier. The movie will get
under your skin and stay there for many days. The denouement
in itself is not particularly bloody or explicit -- if you've
seen Kirby Dick's documentary Sick about Bob Flanagan,
for instance, you've seen a lot more upsetting imagery than Audition
offers. But the emotional force of it is what lodges it
in your mind -- the sense that the actions arise not from sadism
or vengeful rage but from deeply twisted and damaged love.
That's a lot spookier. The night after seeing this, I
literally had a nightmare about Asami smiling sweetly and chirping
"Kiri-kiri-kiri" ("deeper, deeper, deeper"),
which sounds like kitty kitty kitty (talk about cat and
mouse games); it's been a very, very long time since a movie
infected my dreamsleep so immediately. Needless to say, I'm eager
to watch it again as soon as possible.
Audition becomes a bit of a confuse-a-thon
in the end zone. Miike plays guess-what's-real games: "Oh,
it was all a dream" segues into "Okay, guess it wasn't
all a dream" and from there into "Okay, what the hell
is or isn't a dream?" This may be a deal-breaker for those
who don't appreciate such capricious directorial prerogative.
But Miike knows what he's doing. He begins with a straight and
mainstream story, then sets the chaos of decay in motion. The
story collapses; the only reality left is agony and shock. Or,
as Asami points out, "Words can lie; pain is all you can
trust." And the movie is immaculately acted through all
of it, by two leads who are not primarily actors; you wouldn't
know from Ryo Ishibashi's placid, recessive performance as Aoyama
that in real life he's a rock musician, and Eihi Shiina is almost
an absolute beginner, a model stepping into acting. (She'd better
give up on any hopes of being hired to advertise innocent-image
products, that's for damn sure; maybe she has a bright future
modelling latex aprons or medical supplies.) Audition
is a serious, affecting drama that turns into an emotional slaughterhouse
and endurance test (those who are queasy about seeing vomit in
movies had better stay far away) but remains serious and affecting.
Miike says he tries not to work in easy genres, but this is a
horror film in the purest sense: You witness in close-up the
physical and psychic pain one human can inflict on another, in
the name of love, and being horrified is the only conceivable
reaction.
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