CURE (Kyua) Not Rated, 115 minutes; in Japanese with subtitles Written and Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa WHEN, WHERE: Opens today at The Screen
As I write, smoke and debris envelope lower Manhattan and the Pentagon on a day of incomprehensible horror and unforeseeable implications. We will know more by the time this appears in print, but it seems to be the coordinated work of suicide terrorists, controlled by authorities and allegiances as yet unknown.
Perhaps in the grip of today's context it is difficult not to filter everything through the trauma of this evil. Writer/director Kiyoshi (no relation to Akira) Kurosawa's 1997 film is about a series of grisly, ritualized murders, connected in style but committed by different people. The murderers are all easily found; they know what they've done, but they don't know why. `It seemed like the natural thing to do at the time,' one says. The victims are strangers, friends, loved ones. Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho of `Shall We Dance') and his psychologist colleague Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) grope for theories (`The devil made them do it'), and finally hit upon the answer: the killers seem to have been operating under the hypnotic control of a shadowy stranger, a veritable Johnny Appleseed of murder. The premise is a shaky one in literal terms. Most of what we know about hypnosis from a layman's perspective (which is to say, from movies and TV shows) suggests that people cannot be hypnotized to do something abhorrent to them, and this is touched on but not pursued in `Cure'. And the ease with which people are brought under hypnotic trance also stretches credulity. In the classic `The Manchurian Candidate', Laurence Harvey's hypnotic suggestion is triggered by a playing card, but the groundwork has been laid over months of captivity and treatment. Here the trigger is just a simple, but there's no preparation, and the effects are instantaneous and devastating. But there are many layers of darkness at work here, and Kurosawa may be suggesting that the most unimaginable atrocities are not abhorrent to us at some level. The story cuts away from Takabe's investigation of the murders periodically to follow the wanderings of a rootless young man whose name, from a label in his overcoat, seems to be Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara). He claims to have no idea who he is or where he is. He suffers from amnesia of the `How long have you had this problem?' `What problem?' variety. The suspicion grows from time to time that he may be dissembling, but we never know for sure. There are many things we never know for sure, including who he is, where he comes from, and what he wants. Motives are almost entirely absent from the eerie world Kurosawa creates here; there may even be something supernatural at work. `No one understands what motivates a criminal,' the psychologist Sakuma repeats on several occasions, and while one might take issue with that as blanket truth, it applies here. Complicating Detective Takabe's job and distracting his professional focus is the fact that his wife also suffers from a degenerative amnesia. This personal tragedy ties him with particular force to the man he is investigating, who seems to know more than he should about the detective's situation and even what goes on inside his head. Kurosawa keeps his colors muted and his camera at a distance from the action for the most part, telling the story with dispassionate coolness. He strews the field with questions, but is not generous with answers. You'll leave the theater baffled by things that have no apparent explanation – who is the man in the dry cleaners, and what is his relationship with Takabe? `Cure' is intriguing, frustrating, and sometimes annoying. It's also hypnotic. Even when the crimes are solved and the guilty brought to bay, there is none of the sense of closure that we expect. In a way that disconcertingly reflects the world around us, something ominous and ungraspable still hangs in the air, refusing to be exorcized by the closing credits.
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