August 26-September 1, 2004

movies

Another Fine Mess

STRANGE ENCOUNTER: Minami (Hideki Sone) meets his match.

The sputtering glory of Takashi Miike.

by Sam Adams

Just before he beats a fluffy white dog to death, wild-eyed gangster Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) warns, "Everything I'm about to tell you is a joke — don't take it seriously." The dog, he explains as his boss looks on implacably, has been specially trained to attack yakuza, which certainly seems like a joke until he walks out of the restaurant where they're gathered, lifts the poor critter high above his head, and promptly turns it into a mass of foofy hair and blood. So much for not taking him seriously.

The slaughter of this defenseless pup is far from the most gruesome or shocking event in Takashi Miike's Gozu; if it were, his fans would surely object. Miike has built a small but rabid fanbase with a series, or rather a torrent, of features whose variety is matched only by the rapidity with which they appear: more than 50 in the last 10 years. At that rate, the quality-control department is bound to be overtaxed, but his fans don't go to Miike's movies to see perfectly pitched masterpieces. They go, I'd guess, because from moment to moment, movie to movie, there's no telling what Miike will do next.

Watching Miike's movies can be a little bit like wandering through someone else's dreams, particularly if they've had something spicy and a little bit rancid for dinner. There's a plot to Gozu, as far as it goes: Minami (Hideki Sone), Ozaki's partner and friend (and maybe his brother), is ordered to kill Ozaki, whose canine homicide has not gone down too well with the powers that be. Minami balks, but kills Ozaki by accident, which ought to solve all his problems: Now all he has to do is get the body to the designated disposal point and it'll look as if he's done his job. Except when Minami pulls over to call the boss and get a bite to eat, Ozaki's body disappears from the car outside — small wonder, since it's a convertible and Minami has left the top down.

Stuck in a small town whose residents constantly remind him that he's "not from around here," Minami runs into all manner of strange characters: the rather shabby transvestites who run the roadside diner where he loses Ozaki's body, the bald man whose facial skin rash peels off like a bad prosthetic, the middle-aged innkeeper who draws Ozaki's attention to her lactating breasts, which exude so much milk she bottles the excess and sells it to schoolchildren. Then there's the titular demon, with the head of a cow and the body of a human, who shows up in Ozaki's room and gives him a gooey tongue-bath. And that isn't even the strangest visitor he receives.

If at this point you're still trying to unravel the plot, you haven't seen one of Miike's movies before — or for that matter, a lot of recent Japanese cinema. But even by the standards of "dream logic," Gozu's scenes fit only loosely together. It's easy enough to notice that the innkeeper's lacteal secretions bear a certain similarity to the fluid that drips from Ozaki's light fixture into his breakfast tea, not to mention the viscous saliva of the hellish man-cow, or that the multiplying size of Ozaki's meals prefigures the film's climactic birth scene. (No fair spoiling it here.) Miike unquestionably has his motifs in a row. But he's so caught up with demonstrating the explosive force of his imagination that he doesn't bother to yoke them together, and so they expire unnourished.

Miike admits the influence of David Lynch on Gozu, but Lynch's overriding (sometimes overwhelming) sense of mood is nowhere to be found. No doubt because Miike had six other movies to finish by lunchtime, a great many of Gozu's shots are haphazard or at least unremarkable, except when he lifts the lighting scheme from his own, more involving, Audition. Miike's fans seem to use the word "pure" a lot, as if part of the attraction were the sense that the filmmaker's subconscious has somehow found its way up onto the screen without mediation. The scattershot, repetitive quality of his oeuvre thus becomes a badge of authenticity: You can have it polished, or you can have it "real."

To the uninitiated, though, a lot of Miike's shock effects feel calculated, motivated as much by the desire to top himself as any release of psychic energy. There's not much sex in Miike's movies — and what there is, as in Gozu, you often wish you hadn't seen — but their libidinal force is always bubbling beneath the surface, as if a David Cronenberg movie might break out at any moment. But Cronenberg is nothing if not carefully considered, while Miike plays the wild man, chucking out images with the vigor of Jackson Pollock splattering paint. Some will see design, others only a collection of dribbles. Maybe it is all a joke. But beware the fate of the guiltless lap dog: Even a joke can slam you into the pavement.

GOZU Directed by Takashi Miike A Pathfinder release Opens Friday at the Roxy