Audition

A class act horror film - not for anyone with a queasy stomach. Japanese subtitles don't deter from the fact that it can easily rank as a landmark in cinema horror, pushing back taboos. Like Sixth Sense, you could watch half the movie and not know it was going to be a shocker. When the shocks come they make you want to jump out of your seat right into the aisle and then crawl back under it with your face over your hands. More Hitchcock than Cronenberg, there is little in the way of special effects, but lots in the way of a very precisely crafted plot, great acting and editing, atmosphere and moments of evocative beauty as well as terror. The story concerns a Japanese businessman whose friend thinks of a novel way for him to look for a second wife. That's all I'll tell you!

There are about 15 minutes of "Audition" that everyone remembers and talks about, and about 95 minutes of movie that you'd think didn't even exist if you listened to others' comments. But this is the director's fault; when you set out to shock your audience as much as Takashi Miike does in this film, you can't blame the audience if all they remember about your film is the shocking part.

Which is a shame, because "Audition" is quite a bit more than a mere horror movie. It's really more of a feverish psychological drama along the lines of a David Lynch film. In fact, in structure and tone, this film reminded me of Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," and if Lynch didn't have his own unique style and brand of film-making, I might wonder if he was inspired in part by this film when he made his own.

What other comments here have done nicely is summarize what "Audition" is "about." A man (Shigeharu Aoyama) mourning the loss of his wife looks to find the perfect woman to replace her, and he holds bogus auditions for an ostensible film role in order to find her. But the girl who catches his interest (Asami Yamazaki) turns out to be a much better actress than he bargained for. What other comments DON'T necessarily convey, however, is how much of this film takes place in the world of dreams, and how blurred the line between reality and fantasy is. This dilutes the violence of the film's final moments, because there is a strong suggestion that this violence is taking place in the protagonist's nightmares.

Is "Audition" a critique of the confined roles women are forced to inhabit in Japanese society? Is it about Aoyama's guilt in feeling the need for a woman to replace his dead wife? Is it about his fear of finding a girl that actually can replace her, thereby diminishing what he had with her? Is the film about the extent to which all relationships are "auditions," where each person involved makes him/herself vulnerable and exposes him/herself to acceptance or rejection at the whims of another? A case can be made for its being about all of these things.

When the violence comes at the end, it's not as graphic as the hype would lead you to believe. Even so, I wish Miike hadn't pushed the envelope quite so far. One has to wonder if the emotional impact of the film would have been any less just because the violence was less graphic, and I suspect the answer to that is no. The violence feels gratuitous and cheapens slightly everything that comes before it. It mars the film, but fortunately it doesn't ruin it.

This is far more of a thinking man's film that its reputation would lead you to believe. Those who come to it for the titillating shock of its gore are bound to be disappointed.

Grade: B+

Based on a novel by Ryu Murakami, director Takashi Miike's Audition is surprisingly "deliberate" and straightforward for much of its length. It's not a bad film at all, but most of it is in the realm of realist drama, even becoming something of a romance at one point. There are a few brutal images and scenarios, but they arrive primarily towards the end of the film, and they tend to be more conceptually disturbing than graphically violent.

Audition is the story of Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who is living alone with his son, Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki), after his wife, Ryoko (Miyuki Matsuda), passes away. First egged on by Shigehiko, Shigeharu decides to remarry. He enlists the help of a movie producer friend, Yasuhisha Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), who devises a scheme well known to pornographers--he sets up bogus auditions for a film.

Yasuhisha acquires a large number of resumes and headshots for this purpose, out of which he asks Shigehiko to choose 30 women to audition. Before the audition day even arrives, Shigehiko has his eyes set on one particular woman, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina). Asami strikes Yasuhisha as peculiar, but Shigehiko has fallen for her and a romance begins. However, Yasuhisha turns out to be right--there is something strange about her, as the audience can clearly see due to the fine performance from Shiina. Audition explores Asami's story and her relationship to Shigehiko.

It's a good hour, at least, before anything very out of the ordinary happens in the film, and even when that time does arrive, the strange occurrences are extremely subtle at first. The pacing and tone of this first half of the film is more similar to Hideo Nakata's style as displayed in films like Ringu (1998) and Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara, 2002). This is only the third Miike film I've seen so far (I had difficulty tracking them down for purchase or rental before I joined Netflix), and the directorial style of Audition was surprising to me. That's because so far, every Miike film I've seen has a completely different style (the other two I've watched to date are Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1) and Happiness of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no kôfuku), both from 2001).

But as a realist drama that ventures into romance and slight mystery/thriller territory during its first half, Audition is a fine piece of art--you just have to know what to expect. All of Miike's films that I've seen so far--as different as they are stylistically--share excellent direction. Miike is extremely adept at handling his cast, he knows how to get incredible cinematography, and he has interestingly varied ways of blocking scenes. Audition has a combination of a voyeur and a psychologically dissociative theme in its cinematography, appropriate to the plot. We view quite a few scenes from a distance--the camera is sometimes even placed in a room adjacent to the main action; there is a great hand-held tracking shot following Shigeharu and Yasuhisha through their office from behind partitions ala James Whale's Frankenstein (1931); an important "repeated scene" in a restaurant that gives us another psychological angle, with significantly altered dialogue, is shot at a distance; in the dénouement, another repeated dialogue scene with shifted meaning is shot from another room, and so on.

Of course, the main attraction for most folks, at least in my part of the world, is the more mysterious and visceral material that enters in the second half, as the majority of Miike fans tend to be horror fans. For awhile, Miike, Murakami and scriptwriter Daisuke Tengan (whom Miike amusingly says must have "been on drugs" when he wrote Audition, because the script was so weird--he implies that he tried to "normalize" it a bit) play with audience expectations as Audition threatens to become a more standard relationship thriller, then a ghost story, then a rubber reality film (all of these things are implied in turn during one of the best extended sequences of the film), and finally, we realize that it's more about a psychotic villain. This final revelation leads to the infamous climactic scenes of the film, which will test some audience members' constitutions as we venture into more grisly territory accompanied by marvelous hallucinatory sequences. The performances in this section are worthy of a 10, even if, as Miike says in his commentary, Shiina, at least, seemed to almost stop performing and simply became the character--a frightening thought, particularly for Ishibashi.

There are a number of subtexts that one can read into Audition, although Miike characteristically (for Asian genre cinema) stresses an intention of ambiguity. Many read the film as kind of a twisted feminist empowerment fantasy. After all, even if Shigeharu did not have the womanizing history and ill intentions for the audition that some characters believe him to have had, those beliefs are in line with at least a cynical misogynistic account of the typical motivations. Shigehiko's "girlfriend", who makes a brief appearance, is presented as a counterexample to be surmounted on this reading, as she is a traditional token of a more yielding female. Shigeharu's coworker who says she is going to get married is presented as a more implicitly "abused" counterexample.

But the film works on many other levels, too, no less a very literal one. Although I only thought Audition was a "B" (the letter grade equivalent to my 8) this time around, I can easily see my score improving on future viewings when I have more appropriate expectations. If you are a fan of Hideo Nakata's films, or even Byeong-ki Ahn's Phone (2002), which is very similar in tone, you shouldn't miss Audition.

Seven years after his wife dies, Shigeharu Aoyama takes his con's advice and begins looking to remarry. With help from a film producer friend, he sets up a mock audition looking for a woman to play a part that matches his image of his future wife. Whittling the list to 30, he picks the one that strikes a chord with him and, despite not knowing a great deal about her, starts to see her and fall in love.

I had heard a great deal of hype about this film – even the announcer on tv said it caused `outrage' in Japan when first shown. So worried was I that this film would freak me out, that I waiting until a weekend morning to watch it so that I could have daylight everywhere for hours after seeing it!

However, I must admit to having been misled; this film is a very slow little chiller rather than a horror as described. There are horror style moments but overall this is a chilling little tale of one woman's past. The build up is excellent, at times it almost comes across as a comedy; but the film does lay it on a bit thick that `something is not right' at times while not totally explaining things until near the end. That said it is still enjoyable and a little creepy, but you should prepare yourself for the fact that this is not a very fast film – it has a patient pace and you need to be into that; I was a little impatient for the first 15 minutes but after that I settled into it.

The cast are pretty good. Ishibashi is a strong lead male and it is easy to emphasise with his character. Shiina is very good despite the fact that she has to clearly show things beneath the surface. That said, she does a good job of keeping her character real and making the jumps acceptable rather than out of the blue. The telling of the story helps them both out though, keeping it slow but eerie.

Overall, I was a little disappointed with this film as I had hoped to be scared more and freaked out as much as I can be by weird stuff. As it was, this was a well told little creepy film but it is not totally deserving of the reputation it has gotten.

Art-house horror flicks are not a very common genre (few come to mind except 'Don't Look Now') but Takashi Miike's film 'Audition' is a welcome addition to the canon. Beautifully shot and orchestrated, it is both a subtle personal drama and one of the most genuinely horrifying things I have seen. The early stages of this film resemble a work by Claude Sautet, only seen through a Japanese sensibility, about the relationship between an older man and a beautiful young woman, but there's something slightly discomforting both in the man's definition of the perfect partner, and in the person he finds who fulfills it. The story slides into first a mystery, and then a full blown horror story, the power of which comes from following a very simple golden rule: namely, make the audience care about the characters first: one small needle can be very very scary if you think that it's for real. And by keeping the meaning ambiguous (unlike, say, 'The Shining', with its self-defeating collapse into hyperbolic mania), the film also retains its impact after the initial shock.

This sense of ambiguity is also crucial to the film's claims to be something more than simply an unorthodox gore-fest. 'Audition' constructs, and then deconstructs, a certain vision of the world and the "horror" scenes are only part of this. The result is utterly beguiling, and one can even see similarities with Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' in 'Audition's' portrayal of a man's complicit relationship with hell.

In some ways, this is not a universal film and I could not imagine it working in English: can you envisage any Western actress speaking the Eihi Shiina's lines with a straight face?. Whether that's because the film is saying something profound about Japanese culture, or whether the fact that it appears to do so can finesse the issue for foreign audiences, I'm not sure. Dramatically, 'Audition' is, despite its climax, not the best film ever made. But atmospherically speaking, it's a masterpiece.