Wednesday 5th November, 2003 – Audition

Am I the only person in the country who watched Channel 4’s recent ‘100 Scariest Film Moments’ thingy? No, I wasn’t. I have spoken to several people about it since it screened a couple of weeks ago, and I watched it in the same room as my Mum, stepdad, and girlfriend. Mystery solved.

Given the inherent irksomeness of the medium (Why are we so obsessed with ranking things? What is the point when the winner always just reflects a disappointing lowest common denominator? Why is Paul Ross still walking among us when he should be hanging, in a sack, from a lamppost on Oxford Street, being fed tiny scraps of bread and bacon rind, and finally giving something back to the world by acting as a screaming, flinching, doughy-faced human punchbag for the capital to take out its frustrations on?), it was actually quite good.

There were quite a few things on there that I had not seen before, and that seemed to be worth looking up, and quite a few that I had seen and agreed with (the horrible, bone-cracking transformation scene in American Werewolf In London). I was particularly glad that the nightmarish scene in Ring, where Sadako lurches and staggers out of the TV set was in the top 20. This is the most chilling thing I have ever scene, and beats the bludgeoning unpleasantness of The Shining’s ‘Here’s Johnny’ scene hands down for me.

I’ve not seen the American re-make of Ring and, while I’d like to, I doubt that it will be able to capture the chilly suspense and gnawing sense of dread of the Japanese original. People always slag off Hollywood re-makes of classic European and Asian films, and usually with good cause – the Hollywood re-make of Dutch classic The Vanishing, for instance, is so bad that I went insane after seeing it and killed my entire family. Not really. But it really was rub-your-eyes-in-disbelief shit, with Jeff Bridges playing the existentialist psycho-killer who buries his victims alive as a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Kermit the Frog, and with a fruity Euro accent borrowed from Allo Allo’s Lieutenant Gruber. Plus, the original stomach-churningly bleak ending was, naturally, replaced with an action-packed, nick-of-time rescue. Chumps.

However, much as I enjoy poking fun at the Hollywood boobs, they really are often on a hiding to nothing when taking on the classics of European and Asian cinema. It’s not just a matter of translating the language – these films are inevitably suffused with subtle influences and nuances that are unique to their country and language of origin, and that dictate the whole mood of the film. Shorn of these, re-makes inevitably look like pale imitations. In particular, English often doesn’t lend itself to the lyrical qualities of many ‘foreign language’ films. You only used to have to watch the post-match interviews given by Italian footballers on Channel 4’s Gazetta Football Italia to realise that English is a prosaic language at best. While Michael Owen can barely get his act together to grunt a few perfunctory ‘over the moon’ clichés in the aftermath of a tough match, the Italians seize the opportunity to wax lyrical about the courage of their opponents, the splendour of their team’s performance, and the accursed ignorance of the referee, all the while gesticulating and rolling their eyes like some crazy continental John McCriricks.

Anyway, a film that I was surprised didn’t feature in the top 100 was Miike Takashi’s Audition. I haven’t actually seen this film – nonetheless, over the course of the past year or so, it has come to haunt my dreams, and I have become slightly obsessed with it. I saw a trailer for it at the beginning of the Ring 2 video, and couldn’t quite work it out. Was it a romance, a thriller, a horror film? It was deliberately oblique, and was enough to tickle my interest. I looked it up on the internet, and read a number of on-line reviews, each of which described a tender story about two emotionally damaged people learning to trust each other, edging gradually toward love, before some kind of jarringly horrible denouement.

Different reviews went into different amounts of detail about the hideous climax to the film, but I read enough for the images to stamp themselves indelibly onto my psyche. It sounds like the most horrible film ever. I want to watch it. But I don’t want to. But maybe I need to – surely it can’t be as bad as the extravagantly cruel nightmare scenario I have cooked up in my imagination. But I’m not sure if I can. Etc.

Anyway, it was on telly this weekend, and I videoed it. So now I actually am in a position to watch it. I think I’m going to do it. But I’m not sure. Someone told me the other day about how they recently bumped into a normally loud and wearyingly tiggerish friend who, when they met, was ashen-faced and subdued. Apparently she had watched Audition a couple of days beforehand, and was still upset by it. Lordy.

I suppose I’m a bit like Captain Ahab – I am going to have to come face to face with the object of my obsession, or risk being destroyed by it. I will report back on how it goes.

No, I have never read Moby Dick.