Audition

A film that fully deserves its inclusion in the Asia Extreme category. Starts slowly then gets "glose" according to JC.

It came as no surprise after reading In the Miso Soup that Ryu Murakami wants us to understand that Japan's modern curse is solitude. Audition (Odishon) is adapted from his novel about a middle-aged widower, Shigeharu Aoyama, who enlists the help of a friend in the film industry to conduct an bogus audition so he can pick a new wife. They individually examine thirty women in their twenties, shortlisted by virtue of their mugshots, their bios and the fact that they have dedicated themselves to a skill or a hobby.

Aoyama lives with his teenage son with whom he shares the washing up duties and a fairly prosaic domestic life. The household dog, Gangu, meanders about the early scenes as a waggy-tailed emblem of vulnerable innocence. You just know the dog's not going to make it.

There's a secretary at work that clearly wants more from Aoyama, but he can't see it. He desires young, classy and obedient. Be careful what you wish for is the obvious message here.

Up until about midway through this story you could almost predict an American remake. But from here Takeshi Miike takes us down deeper into hell than most Western audiences are prepared to venture. And that was as far as I got on the first sitting. It was too early in the morning for me to explore such shadowy places, so I switched over to watch Reza Mahammad on the Saturday Kitchen instead. When I did steel myself for the last half hour I found I myself watching most of it through my fingers.

You could say that this film has a particular perspective on Japanese sexual politics. The widower represents the nobler side of middle-aged romanticism, but attitudes such as his and their less sublimated equivalents have helped restrict the aggregate female persona in Japan to within highly defined limits, and this is shown to have had a negative impact on human relations in general.

Asami is an embodiment of feminine retribution on all Japanese manhood. Just because Aoyama is basically decent doesn't make him an innocent. In one scene his son, a dinosaur enthusiast, explains why he couldn't hit it off with the polite and pretty girl that he chatted up on the bus suggesting that even the attitudes of the younger generation are replicating the stymied interactions of their parents.

The story has loads of Ryu Murakami's hallmark guilt and self-loathing. It struck me that the female psychopath driven by physical and cultural abuse by men is here primarily a vehicle for examining male pyschology. And in the very last scene Asami is less of a pyscho in the Western style and more like that other demon of the Japanese imagination, the robot.