Dec. 08, 2004 - Issue #477: Bukowski
All systems Gozu
Cow-headed demons and missing yakuza corpses populate Takashi Miike's
latest oddity
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
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