Angel Dust

Very reminiscent of Dario Argento's films without being anywhere near as violent. The story is somewhat muddled but the cinematography is amazing. The film's many weak points are overcome by an incredible look and feel and atmosphere. Like the recent anime Perfect Blue the problems with the story only bother you when it's over, while you're watching it the atmosphere carries you along.

Starts off feeling a little bit like a cross between Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs in terms of it being a crime/police procedural mixed with a psychological thriller, but it becomes something different and far harder to describe or compare to anything as it goes along.

It never entirely lost me, thankfully, and it was consistently interesting to see where it would go next. You get the sense wherever it's going it bound to be dark and twisted, but it's never easy to work out how it's going to shock or surprise you as a viewer next.

If there's any complaints I had, I guess I wish it had been a little tighter/shorter, but still pretty good either way.

"Angel Dust" starts with macroscopic shots of nighttime Tokyo. Seemingly endless but ingenious montage, somewhat as if Teshigahara tried to do a megalopolis, drops us gradually to a single subway station, then to a single female figure just as she falls. Precisely the bit of screen occupied by this fall becomes the mouth of a cave. The next cut is to spelunkers, but, if only because I'd just finished the "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" section of Rubin's monograph on Murakami, I felt for a half a second as if the subway victim had slipped down a surreal hole in the platform. There's a hole, too, later, in the b/w dialog of the re-brainwash patient. Since Murakami's also author of the interview tomes abridged here as "Underground", it's necessary to note this film's dated 1994. The final Aum incident hit March 1995. Even if you've seen "Angel Dust," it might pay to watch just after a reading of "Underground." Director Sogo Ishii at a PFA appearance a year or two ago expressed some embarrassment over his film's prescience. Mt. Fuji appears three or four times in the film, filling nearly the whole screen like a national marker, a reminder. I don't pretend to know of what, but the final time, nearly the film's last shot, Fuji's an ominously dark pre-dawn silhouette.

A little after that first killing, much of the city now aware of the subway serial killer, one of a couple of wise-guy salary men (or maybe they're plainclothesmen, doesn't matter) asks the other, "If you were the killer, who here would you pick?" "Her!" The camera zooms to his choice. Cut to a news sheet photo of the same face. He picked the next victim! What were the odds? But he's nobody, not even a red herring, just a dope. Here the film crosses Stanislaw Lem's "The Investigation." Was there really something about the victim? Or did ninety-nine other such dopes, elsewhere in the subway system guess wrongly? Still later, our protagonist, Setsuko, picks a subsequent victim and, in a scene echoed by the concert night murder in "...Lily Chou Chou ," pursues her through throngs heading toward a domed entertainment venue. Did Setsuko really psych the killer, or did the killer simply comply this time with her choice? Setsuko's ex, Aku: "There's not always a single answer. Some people look only for a unique answer." Again, this is Lem territory.

Setsuko is an odd, very careful concoction: bobbed hair, little suits always buttoned, nearly always a wide-eyed straight ahead gaze. I tried to catch her blinking. No luck. If you think you recognize her new-age-y husband, he's both the funnily wise friend from "Love Letter" and the self-defeatingly compliant husband from "Undo." Angel Dust's music is perfect, perfectly synched, percussive, modern, vaguely traditional.

Another touchpoint? "Pygmalion," any version. Setsuko is Liza. Her Higgins is an enigma. I don't know whether he's evil. Ishii also directed "The Crazy Family," which could be point three in a four point progression beginning with whichever Ozu you choose, proceeding to "The Family Game,"and ending, at least for the moment, with "Visitor Q."

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There's some interesting use of sound In "Angel Dust" and some splendid cinematography by Norimicho Kasamatu, especially of interiors and the memorable scene with many umbrellas. Kaho Minami, who plays the female lead, Setsuk Suma, a Tokyo "police psychologist," is beautiful, and her co-star Takeshi Wakamatsu, as psychologist Rei Aku, has an appealing rakishness about him. Unfortunately the plodding direction by Sogo Ishii lacks tension and rambles more than a bit. Add to that a convoluted mishmash of pop psychology, stilted dialogue, posed theatrics, and we have one long disappointment.

The dialogue is probably not as bad as it appears in the English subtitles, which were very poorly edited with bad verb numbers, wrong tenses and some strange word translations, e.g., "re-brain- washing" for reprogramming. Or, "You're a pleasure homicidal mania" the killer is told, meaning the killer enjoys his work, I imagine. Annoying, unconvincing and too long were the "re-brain- washing" sequences presented in grainy, flickering black and white (we were supposed to be seeing them as on video tape). The idea of a religious cult member committing murders on the Tokyo subway is as real as newspaper headlines, of course, but the psychology behind the killings here didn't wash. The "religion" was so generic as to be anonymous. We felt nothing for the victims because they were not made real, nor were any of the characters except the leads really animated.

More than anything though this movie suffered from the miscasting of Kaho Minami as the police shrink. She was somewhat believable in her "disintegrating" phase (although the scene at Aku's sanatorium with him on the TV screen was unintentionally silly), but entirely too wimpy and dreamy to be convincing as any kind of cop. The scenes with her and Aku were interesting as far as they went; unfortunately, the sharp chemical contrast between his macho nature and her alluring femininity was not ignited. One had the sense they were saving that for after the film was over. Too bad. The androgynous nature of her husband and the killer seemed pointless, but again possibly something was lost in the translation.

I think what happened here is Sogo Ishii got caught between a theatrical tradition and some notions of Western style realism, and ended up with succotash.

There are few movies as original as Angel Dust, especially in the realm of thrillers with hoary cliches, transparent plot turns, and questionable endings. Billed as both a Usual Suspects-style stumper and a Silence Of The Lambs-style thriller, Angel Dust sports a plot which climbs a tension ladder masterfully, pausing long enough between rungs to entertain a host of solution theories -- usually presented by lead police investigator Suma's partners -- and examinations of Suma's method of investigation. Complications abound in Suma's case, and, as with The Big Lebowski, we only know what the protagonist knows. (In other words: the whats, not so many of the whys.) As Suma's case progresses unevenly, waiting for the payoff might frustrate; the solution stays at arm's length throughout the movie, but the cinematography and editing are pristine (the waltzing cuts in Suma's reunion with ex-boyfriend/research partner/current suspect rule! RULE!), getting you through the first viewing as well as repeats. The plot thankfully holds up to scrutiny as well, though the details trickily come in clumps (hard on Suma as well as the viewer). My only beef with director Ishii is that while Suma is deftly depicted early on as an unconventional, instinctual investigator with a bizarre lifestyle, we still have to see her puffing away in no-smoking zones a la Martin Riggs. We get it -- she lives on her own planet. At any rate, Angel Dust is a must-see lesson in treatment of fringe characters, deliberate but graceful plot movement, economy of dialogue, use/absence of sound, and mind-mangling psychological tension (with little onscreen violence). Yay! Also check out March Comes In Like A Lion, Junk Food, Maboroshi, Audition.