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Who else but Takashi Miike would come up with a "Yakuza horror fantasy" film?... And a damn good one at that? Miike's genius is to create a brilliant melange of such distant genres as Yakuza and horror-comedy, with even some love story element for good measure, in a bizarre, whacked-out movie with the same kind of intelligent twist that made his previous films so delightfully uproarious. Instead of an extravagant bloodbath seen in many of his other films, Gozu rather presents a trip into the bizarre realm of unsettling, funny and unique bit of bloodcurdling surrealism, with imagery and fever-dream logic that rivals David Lynch's. Story Minami, a young Yakuza, has been worried recently about his beloved Yakuza superior, Ozaki, whose increasingly erratic behaviour alarms their boss who orders Minami to take him out. Minami reluctantly takes his Yakuza brother to a "family disposal dump" in Nagoya city, but he inadvertently carries out the job when he hits the brakes all of a sudden, causing Ozaki to break his neck. Bewildered Minami pulls up to a roadside cafe where he calls up his boss, but when he returns to his car, Ozaki's body has disappeared without a trace. Desperately, Minami starts searching for the body, but the car gets a flat tyre which leaves him stranded in a godforsaken suburban area. Worse is yet to come, with all people that he encounters from then on seem to have a few bats in their belfrys. From the pair in gold and silver outfits who chases him around, to the man in his white clown half-face makeup. As if that wasn't enough, he runs into a minotaur-like beast at the eerie inn he found. He passes out from the freakish encounter, and when he comes around, he finds a message (on his crotch!) from Ozaki who is supposed to be dead, which reads, "... Waiting at the disposal dump." |
While studying at the Academy of Broadcasting and Film, Takashi Miike
started working as an assistant director for directors like Shohei Imamura
and Hideo Onchi. Since launching his directorial career in early 1990's
with straight-to-video movies, this remarkably prolific filmmaker has
been busy cranking out several movies for video and television each year,
and he still works in those milieus even after he started filming successful
theatrical features in 1995. In addition, he also makes music videos,
movie trailers and "Muraokoshi" movies or movies that are produced by
regional governments to promote tourism. All this is testimony to his love of filmmaking, regardless of the area in which he works. The director prefers working with screenplays that are underwritten, or in his own words, "screenplays that are only 60% complete." This means he enjoys the process of filling in the blanks left by screenplays while creating. Even when his movie's source material is a best-selling novel, like "Audition" by Ryu Murakami, he packs enough energy to reconstruct the whole story to make it wholly his own. While Murakami's novel is a study in insecurity focusing on an abrasive relationship of a couple, Miike turns his film into a full-blown psychological shocker with pins, needles and limb removals. "Katakuri-ke no Kofuku (The Happiness of the Katakuris)" would be a simlar example. While based on the Korean black comedy "Quiet Family," Miike's "Katakuris" is a delirious musical comedy that gives any Bollywood production a run for the money, with extravagant(?) use of cheap claymation, wacky karaoke styled musical numbers, and predominantly (and intentionally) tasteless atmosphere throughout. In his "Visitor Q," a mother soaks around with her own breast milk, and that's just one of the loads of provocative (or gross-out, if you like) scenes in the film. And what about "Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha," which follows the escalating grudge and enmity between a cop and a crook, but ends up blowing up the whole planet? The reason for this, according to the director, is simple: He found the original ending a bit too boring. The interesting thing about Miike's filmmaking philosophy is that he uses the general indifference to the art of cinema in Japan (which any filmmaker would look down on with disdain) for his own benefit. He happily admits that because of that, he doesn't have to work under the microscope, and he can do as he pleases with his films, making them in whatever styles he fancies. |
