Week of December 9, 2004, Issue #477
FILM
All systems Gozu
By PAUL MATWYCHUK
I’m no expert on the films of Japanese auteur Takashi Miike—at
the rate this guy makes movies, often as many as six or seven in a single year,
keeping up with Miike’s output is less a hobby and more a full-time job—but
I’ve sat through enough of them to have approached Gozu,
the latest of his films to get a mainstream DVD release in North America, with
the proper mixture of anticipation and dread. I’ve seen the psychotic
heroine of Audition stick needles into the eyes of her immobilized middle-aged
suitor and saw off his feet with piano wire; I’ve seen the guy get split
in two by a samurai sword in Ichi the Killer; hey, I’ve even seen the
prostitute from Dead or Alive get drowned in a wading pool filled with excrement
(although I had to turn my face away in disgust at that one). What new visual
outrages would Miike commit this time out?
As it turns out, Gozu finds Miike in a more playful, subdued mood than usual—there’s
a wild sense of humour running through most of Miike’s films, but Gozu
is the closest thing of his I’ve seen to an outright comedy. The film
opens, for instance, with a hilarious scene in which a gangster named Ozaki
(Sho Aikawa) stands up in the middle of a yakuza meeting, announces that the
tiny dog he sees a woman petting just outside the restaurant they’re sitting
in is actually a vicious “trained yakuza attack dog,” runs out the
door, picks up the dog and smashes it to death with his bare hands. Miike’s
never shied away from violence in his films, but he stages this scene as a bit
of surreal slapstick—at one point, Ozaki twirls the poor creature over
his head on its leash like a lasso. You feel about as much horror at the sight
as you do when Michael Palin keeps accidentally killing those dogs in A Fish
Called Wanda.
Ozaki’s superiors, however, are understandably concerned about his mental
health, and they order his partner, an easily flustered rookie named Minami
(Hideki Sone), to kill him and dump his body. Minami accomplishes the first
part of his assignment (albeit accidentally), but before he can dispose of the
body, it mysteriously disappears from his car while he’s busy making a
phone call to his superiors. The rest of the film follows Minami on a wild goose
chase as he tries to locate Ozaki’s corpse. Stranded in Nagoya—a
small nowhere of a town halfway between Tokyo and Hiroshima that’s sort
of the Japanese equivalent of Podunk—Minami is even more out of his element
than usual, and every encounter he has only discombobulates him further.
When he goes into a restaurant for a coffee, he’s served a complimentary
dessert than sends him racing to the men’s room to throw up. The motel
he checks into is run by a middle-aged woman who’s very proud of her constantly
lactating breasts. The only person who offers to help him out has a circular
blotch of white, dried-out skin covering half his face. And I haven’t
even mentioned the cow-headed demon that appears to Minami in a dream and licks
him all over his face with his obscenely huge tongue. (The script is by Sakichi
Sato, best known for playing “Charlie Brown” in the first Kill Bill
movie.)
A lot of reviewers have compared Gozu to the films of David Lynch, and Minami’s
adventures in Nagoya do bear a certain resemblance to the first half of Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, with Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland wandering around
a weird small town where everybody reacts to their presence with an inscrutable,
deadpan hostility. But as the essay by Miike expert Tom Mes included in the
DVD explains, it’s probably more helpful to think of Gozu as a satire
on the strain of barely repressed homosexuality that runs through the strenuously
macho yakuza genre. It’s obvious to the viewer that Ozaki and Minami are
in love—at one point, Ozaki even gives Minami a pair of crotchless panties
as a token of friendship—except the virginal, repressed Minami is incapable
of acting on his desires. Only at the end of the film, when Ozaki magically
reappears, having been reincarnated in the body of a gorgeous woman, is the
impasse broken.
This plot twist sets the stage for one of the most memorable climaxes (and one
of the funniest closing lines) in Miike’s entire oeuvre. Gozu will definitely
not be to everyone’s tastes, but anyone in the mood for a surreal, gender-bending
yakuza comedy/horror movie and who doesn’t mind seeing a lot of bodily
fluids spewing out onto the screen ought to give it a whirl. There ought to
be—what? At least three of you out there, right? V
Gozu
Directed by Takashi Miike • Written by Sakichi Sato • Starring
Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa and Kimika Yoshino • Now on DVD