|
|
In the past few years, one prolific director has become the most notorious Japanese film director in the world. While Kitano, Kurosawa and Miyazaki attract the art crowd, Takashi Miike is carving out a niche for himself as the wild man of Japan. With a series of outrageous films screened at festivals or released on DVD, he's the hippest name to quote when pointing to a resurrection in the fortunes of the Japanese cinema industry. While domestic cinema (apart from anime) is falling further and further behind Hollywood, the way Miike is feted by the film geeks abroad, you would think he was the savior of Japanese film. The irony, of course, is that Miike is still an aquired taste here.
Miike prides himself on his speed and his quantity. He regularly makes 5 or 6 features in a year, many for the straight-to-video market, but a few worthy of mainstream release in multiple cinemas. (Many straight-to-video titles get "theatrical" releases - a week of late shows in one cinema in the Tokyo suburbs - just for the video package.) Tom Mes, founder of the Midnight Eye site, a puff page for Japanese film, claims that his book Agitator, is the definitive guide to Miike's films, since it reviews 36 films completed between 1991 to 2002. Of course, it's already out of date, since in the meantime Miike has finished another eight movies and counting, including Zebraman, Chakushin Ari, and Gozu.
Unfortunately, just as few great men can choose their biographers, directors are at the mercy of their critics and Mes is all wrong for Miike. Mes takes on Miike as if he were Godard or some nouvelle vague auteur, always looking for symbols, references and big themes. Like a nutty scientist determined to prove a theory despite all the experimental evidence, he spends about three-quarters of this 400-page book arguing that Miike is an auteur. It's exhaustive and exhausting, pompous and humorless, intellectual and plodding - all the things Miike is not. The best part of the book is Miike's diary of the making of Ichi the Killer and the interview, in which the director dismantles all of Mes's preconceptions with a few trenchant words.
Mes' hobbyhorse is that Miike is an outlaw director within the industry, and that all his films deal with outsiders, rootless outcasts looking for happiness, nostalgia or family. It doesn't seem to occur to him that the generic themes of Miike's oeuvre are dictated by the genre of the films themselves. Fully two thirds of the movies reviewed are Yakuza films, which funnily enough, deal with rootless outcasts looking for a sense of family within the gang structure. But Mes has found his theme, and he proceeds to find rootless outcasts everywhere, while cross-referencing cliches and genre staples among the movies to construct a hermetically sealed, self-referential Miike world. (In the ridiculous review of MPD-Psycho, Mes finds some orphaned kids and gloats that they will "consequently become rootless individuals"!) Miike's first godawful forays into Yakuza v-cinema aren't compared to other awful low-budget gangster flicks. No, they're compared to later Miike V-cinema works, and strangely enough, the latter films are exactly the same, but better. (Mes's opening line is a classic. "Perhaps it was his lack of drive to become a filmmaker, but Takashi Miike's early work is a lot less accomplished than his later films." Or maybe it was because he was a novice?)
Mes ties himself up in knots and then is hoist on his own petard. He claims that Miike is "an outlaw director" but this is nonsense: no maverick would be asked to shoot 5 or 6 films a year. Miike is the Japanese film industry's most popular gun for hire! Mes searches for "rootless outcasts" in every film, and finds them in the teenyboppers in Andromedia, or the schoolgirls kicking butt in Tennen Shojo Mann, or most ridiculously, in the form of the hero of Audition, a widower TV producer - now there's a rebel and an outcast! Mes falls over himself trying to justify or explain the unwatchable, gratuitous, totally exploitative rape and violence in Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q or Graveyard of Honor, but ends up convincing nobody.
Miike gets some revenge at the end, responding to the critical claptrap with some refreshingly frank details about the making of Ichi the Killer as he edits images with a CG operator. "'Please cut off this guy's tongue.' 'OK.' Slosh, slosh. 'Please make the needle appear out of his mouth.' 'Okay.' Jab! `Split Tadanobu Asano's mouth open from ear to ear.' 'Here we go!' Rip! 'At the end, sprinkle it with some sperm.' 'Gladly.' Drip, drip." Does this sound like the voice of an auteur self-referencing his own oeuvre? Or just some kid having fun with a magic paintbox?
People don't watch Miike for his themes and motifs. They watch his movies because no matter how low-budget or generic the flick, you can usually count on him doing something outrageous, whether it's a gangster pulling an atom bomb out of a suit pocket, or a ballerina severing a suitor's foot with piano wire, or a karate-mad schoolgirl training on a beach - pulling not one tire but a dozen tires behind her. What Mes takes 300 pages to explain, fellow cult director Shinya Tsukamoto nails in four words to describe Miike. "Fierce. Nonsensical. Vulgar. Powerful."
Richard Jeffery
back
|
|
|
