Face fears and crossing boundaries: Takashi Miike’s “Audition”

As a medium which can present an emotional assault with few rivals in the arts, there are some films which even the most jaded film viewer approaches with some trepidation and, yes, even fear. When I was just beginning to delve deeper into the cinema in my teens by reading every film book I could lay my hands on, just the passing references to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” were enough to have me avoid it during my impressionable youth and, in fact, well beyond. That film still repels many just a year shy of its 40th anniversary (I’m wondering what company will be brave enough to issue a celebratory Blu-ray 3D edition), although I made my peace with that bit of brutal cinema a few years ago. Does it present an affront to a viewer? Of course. But it also challenges one’s conceptions of morality and today I am staunch defender of Pasolini’s film for its artistic merit … despite a hesitancy to revisit its dark metaphorical charms with any real frequency. There will probably always be films inviting debate for exceeding the boundaries of taste, but that’s certainly nothing new. I’m reminded of a passage in Hemingway’s  “A Moveable Feast,” where he visits Gertrude Stein at her literary salon. Giving her critique of Hemingway’s stort story “Up in Michigan,” a tale of date rape, Stein calls the story inaccrochable, which in the context of a work of art, translates roughly as one likely to go unexhibited or unsold due to tastelessness or sexual content. The modern cinema long ago dispelled this outmoded demureness, as works of explicit sexuality and inaccrochable material have proven to sell very well, indeed. But Stein’s defining of art’s boundaries is still valid when it comes to the extremes of taste, although the dogmatic application of such standards can also breed preconceptions that can steer us away from movies that make us think, solely based on what they may make us queasily experience. Such is the case with “Audition,” an undeniably gory film by Japanese director Takashi Miike, a film I’ve managed to put off for more a decade. But having recently finished Irish director/film critic Mark Cousins’ breathtaking documentary series outlining of the history of cinema, “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” Cousins’ praise for Miike quelled my apprehensions, begging me to finally watch “Audition.” Miike has become something of the auteur of graphically extreme social commentary in his native Japan. Even so, he remains a cult figure whose movies probably generate more academic debate than gross receipts. Any release of his movies in North America would probably require an NC-17 rating, or worse, a hackneyed edit of the scenes deemed most offensive, emasculating it of its message. Which is a pity, because as hard as it is to watch all the way through, “Audition” is a courageously insightful film that earns every drop of its viscera, and whose underlying political message is — or at least should be — much more disturbing than its over-celebrated bloodletting. The first half of “Audition” plays much like the dramas of other Japanese directors, with a ploddingly thoughtful introduction to a broken family. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) loses his wife to an illness in the first scene, with the dying wife on the bed intercut with shots of her young son walking up the corridor bearing a hand-made gift for her. This melodrama is followed by a jump to seven years later, when the son (Tetsu Sawaki) is now a lively teen who tells his father that he looks old and should consider remarriage. Together with his film producer friend Yasuhisa (Jun Kinimura), Aoyama contrives an audition for a fake film project so that he can overview a few dozen young women for dating purposes. From the ensuing parade of young ambitious actresses, Aoyama selects the mysterious Asami (Eihi Shiina), a shy former ballet dancer whose resume essay intrigues Aoyama with descriptions of mourning and loss that mirror his own. Their courtship is touching, slow, and full of genuine moments, with the two trading bits of information and slowly allowing access to each other’s interior. Aoyama is nevertheless the aggressor, being the older one and the instigator, as well as the male. But his deepening desire for Asami and craving for entry into her life is sincere, which makes the radical gear-shift of the last act of Audition all the more unsettling. Aoyama is our sympathetic protagonist, an aging widower looking for love, and thus not the expected subject of the kind of horrible vengeance Asami finally wreaks upon him. It is this seemingly unjustified twist that reeks of sadism to many, who dismiss “Audition” as an incredibly gratuitous ruination of what was amounting to a very sweet film about lonely people seeking a second chance. But it’s this twist that is exactly Miike’s point about the true disorder of Japanese society. The problem is not beautiful, seemingly nice girls who turn out to be medically-trained sadists, but the normal sexualization of Japanese women by men who don’t think of themselves as abusive or hateful. Miike’s trick is to first show us a movie world in which we think we know the rules. Aoyama’s loneliness is not especially selfish, and his occasional guilt over the memory of his deceased wife provides touchstones to his humanity. The audition is a fraud, but Aoyama himself thinks so too. He isn’t trying to exploit the women, just find a compatible one. In parallel, the audience is drawn into the game as well, delighting in the voyeuristic pleasure of watching 30 pretty Japanese girls preen and prance and occasionally strip for us. The other women in Aoyama’s life aren’t victims either — his subordinate who announces her impending marriage, his housekeeper, and the teenage girl who studies biology with his son all pass through Aoyama’s life like unimportant minor characters. He’s only interested in Asami, more so when she disappears on him, leading him to an investigation of her past that begins to reveal a dark side with implications of murder.The deeper Aoyama gets into his search for Asami, the more his life and mind begin to unravel, concurrent with the unraveling of our own understanding of what kind of movie we are watching. Although “Audition” drops several early hints that Asami is not what she appears, we are still unprepared for the descent into dream logic that Miike takes us on. “Audition” liberally mixes and matches sections of dialogue and scenery, placing dream sequences within dream sequences, and jumps back and forth between time, space, and realities. But it’s not a random pastiche — rather, it mirrors the collapse of Aoyama’s sheltered world, and more importantly accumulates into an unexpected indictment of Aoyama’s (and our) entire sexual existence. In one long hallucinatory sequence, he engages in terrifying oral sex with every woman in the movie in turn, unleashing his subconscious guilt into a conscious crime. Aoyama is not a bad person, and neither are we, and in mutating the comfort of our own middlebrow sexual ideas into a list of indictments that warrant torturous punishment, Miike accomplishes something revolutionary, or at least way overdue. Its insight, as well as the likelihood of its miscomprehension by most audiences, is reminiscent of Remy Belvaux’s 1992 fake-documentary masterpiece “Man Bites Dog.” Following a charming serial killer with a camera crew, Belvaux casualizes and humorizes his protagonist’s multiple homicides until we forget that it’s murder — something which most mainstream entertainment does as well. Bit by bit the camera crew becomes involved in the killings, as does the audience by extension, climaxing in the drunken butchering and rape of a pregnant women whose fetus is eviscerated. It’s this scene which delivers Belvaux’s hidden message that murder is horror, and we are horrible for having enjoyed any of it. Not coincidentally it’s also this scene that had to be edited out for release in most markets, reducing “Man Bites Dog” to a mockumentary about a serial killer who eventually gets killed by another serial killer and sparing us the discomfort of facing our own appalling appetite for violence as entertainment. “Audition” uses very different but equally disciplined method to deliver a similar message about sex. Asami represents the very essence of mainstream desirability — young, lithe, opaque yet sweet — what Yasuhisa describes as “beautiful, classy, and obedient.” Even when she turns into a nightmare sadist she’s still sexy, a calm philosopher whose face never breaks from its angelic expression even as she executes a piano-wire amputation. Even when we see what she has reduced a former victim to — and believe me, it’s awful — Asami never descends into monstrosity. Miike never lets us off the hook because Asami never stops being what we still desire. True, she’s a victim as well, but it’s not something that we haven’t seen before (another indictment of society), whereas her response to it is, by contrast, an incomprehensible extreme. The juxtaposition of Asami’s possible normalcy and concurrent serenity of action, along with Aoyama’s lack of having done anything society considers wrong, is what makes “Audition” so powerful. Its violence is not that much worse than what Denzel Washington does to his victims in the mainstream “Man on Fire,” in which he chops off body parts to our applause, because those who bleed are child abductors. Asami’s torture of Aoyama is unacceptable to the mainstream because Aoyama is us. Whereas “Man on Fire” panders to our righteousness by inflicting atrocities on bad guys, “Audition” upsets it by suggesting powerfully that the essential relationship between men and women is itself a slow act of permitted violence. Whether or not you think this is true doesn’t diminish the thematic uniqueness and cinematic courage of “Audition” or the tragedy of a great film being avoided by most people because it’s filed under the unspeakable or inaccrochable , or withheld from even more because it dares to ask what is truly horrible.