AUDITION (Odishon)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Director: Takashi Miike Writer: Daisuke Tengan, story by Ryu Murakami Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Jun Kunimura Screened at New York's Film Forum, 209 W. Houston Street
Could it be that the women we all so love, the human beings whom Dr. T (Richard Gere) declares are all saints, bear desires for revenge against us men? Well, yeah, after all Clytemnestra killed her hero husband Aegisthus for cheating on her as Jason slaughtered her two children to get back at Jason. Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise turned into flaming anti-male feminists, in Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's "Baise-Moi" two hookers, Manu and Nadine, take violent revenge against men after being brutalized. The fantasy dominates Giacomo Puccini's opera "Turandot," which premiered at La Scala in Milan on April 25, 1926, the story of a empress, Turandot, who gives men a chance to win her hand by guessing riddles and which, failing that, sends them to the executioner. As we see, then, reprisals by women against men are at least as ancient as Aeschylus.
Now comes a Japanese version of the same theme, this one by Takashi Miike, who is not a household word in the U.S. but who knocks out four films annually in his native country. "Audition," which took two critics' prizes at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000, horrifies not only because of a gruesome ending that could impact on dating agencies and will have us sharing homolies like "Don't judge a book by its cover," but because for most of its absorbing 115 minutes we are watching what looks like a cinematic version of a potential new TV series, The Japanese Dating Game.
Not that any of this aesthetically elegant and challenging stuff would appear on mere TV. The story centers on an overweight, lonely 40-year-old, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) whose wife died seven years ago, leaving him and his young son Ryoko (played as a teen by Miyuki Matsuda). While most guys would start dating the normal way--bars, computer dating services, women at the workplace--Aoyama does something more dramatic. He gets together with an associate and sets up a phony audition for an abandoned movie project, but Aoyama's mind is made up before the audition starts: he wants the twenty- four-year-old #28, Asami Yamazaki (played by fashion model Eihi Shiina). Is he the only one who doesn't see something spooky about her--despite her beauty and her comformity to a Japanese ideal of timidity and deference? Yep. He ignores his partner, sets up a couple of dates, and he's in heaven. Is Asami different from the type of person she appears to be? Yep again. But wait! She may not be. All depends on what you make of the ending, a dazzling, surreal ride into images and sounds that Japan's David Cronenberg, Takashi Miiki thrust at us--boom boom boom, almost out of the blue.
Audition, or Odishon as the title transliterates from the Japanese, has some of the most harrowing, graphic closeups of torture yet seen on the screen, scenes that make recent American films of the genre such as Brad Anderson's "Session 9"--a bloody display of the disintegration of the mind of an average person-- look like "Bambi." Do horror films need to be so explicit? No, as the immensely popular but highly overrated "Blair Witch Project" indicates. But as the director states in an interview, the final scenes are, in his view, organic to the events and not used just to shock, and yet, he adds, "the directors whose films scare me the most are the ones who carefully hide the aggression in the background." In this case, I'd say that Ms. Shiina's character is so "ideally Japanese feminine" that we have to be convinced that appearance is only skin deep. And we are, we certainly are. A well-done scary movie that might make us married men sleep with one eye open.
Not Rated. Running time: 115 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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