ANGEL DUST
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A quasi-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS thriller from one of Japan's most remarkable new directors, although his evident talent doesn't make this movie really work.
I so badly wanted ANGEL DUST to be more than the sum of its parts. This is a maddeningly slow, oddly unsatisfying movie that contains many individually spellbinding things -- good performances, a hypnotic score and many mesmerizing images -- but doesn't have a story that can redeem it.
The plot: Every day at six P.M. sharp, in the heart of Tokyo, a young woman dies on the subway, the victim of a pattern killer whose motives are obscure. One of the detectives assigned to the case is a young woman whose former lover, a psychologist who helped deprogram former cult members, may be somehow entangled in the killings. There are a number of twists and revelations, none of which I'll reveal here, but I can safely say that the plot is not exactly designed to keep the audience guessing.
The movie makes much of specific things that never really add up or go anywhere: deprogramming, cult psychology, the dynamics between patient and therapist, former lovers, and so on. None of these elements are really *used* -- they're just added to the heap, and we're expected to take them and run with them. I'm always annoyed by this strategy, which seems to imply that any director with enough of a brain to just *mention* these things in a movie is worth applauding.
ANGEL DUST is agonizingly leisurely in its pacing. At first this helped set up a mood, which I always appreciate when done right, but the movie slowly turns into nothing *but* mood. If shortened by about half an hour, it would have been even more effective (and that's still being generous); as it stands, it's ponderous and unrewarding. There are whole stretches of the movie where there is so little happening that I wondered if the movie had become permanently derailed. Then comes a quick burst of powerful visuals. Then another slow spot. The pattern repeats. This technique quickly wears out its welcome.
The single eeriest thing about the movie is the way it presaged the Aum Shinri Kyo subway murders, but not in a way that grants any real insight into the subject. What a letdown, because ANGEL DUST was directed by Sogo Ishii, one of Japan's foremost avant-garde directors. His talent is unmistakeable in this film -- it's probably amazing in a theater -- but he was at the mercy of an inferior script this time around. It's hard to speak really well of a movie when the strongest reaction it provokes is, "What the hell was *that* all about?"
Two and a half out of four commuter trains.
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