46-okunen no koi

I saw this at the London film festival if I am remembering correctly.

BEFORE seeing it: I read Miike now explores "faith in a godless universe and the intensely queer focus on all colours of 'masculinity'". OK I have to see this!!

AFTER seeing it: Good but I like Miike's other films much better (Gozu, Visitor Q). This is not a bad film. It is a bit too indulgent and slow. Visuals are nice. The visible heartbeat, the smile of the warden (too many times repeated though)... And I can't get over how amazingly cool the prisoners' uniforms were!

But while enjoyable, it didn't do much for me.

With Ryuhei Matsuda playing a featured role, I was constantly reminded of Oshima's Gohatto (Matsuda's debut film). In fact, I'm not so sure that this movie isn't a meditation on Gohatto, a sort of futuristic spiritual version. There are a lot of similarities, despite the completely different genres and storytelling techniques of the two films. Both take place in closed male societies, both have beautiful murderers, obsessive love, and mystery. And they both have Ryuhei Matsuda.

Gohatto is a more traditional film (compared to this one, anyway), and the symbolism is not so heavy-handed as it is here. There's no rocket ship or pyramid or all that those two things imply. There is an awful lot going on in this film, probably a little too much.

The mix of stage-play theatricality with cinematic realism is a little distracting, and it put me on guard against excessive artiness. And let's face it, there is excessive artiness. That's not to say the movie isn't beautiful to look at--it is.

And it's worth seeing. But if you haven't seen Gohatto, see it. Gohatto is to 46-Okunen No Koi as the velvet glove is to the sledgehammer.

This voyeuristically expressionistic film is set in an unknown future in which Ryuhei Matsuda plays a soft, sad gay bartender imprisoned for his strange and brutal killing of a customer who attacked him, and Masanobu Ando is a Yakuza thug packed to the top with pent-up anger and violence that makes him tight as a drum till he sporadically bursts. The two arrive in a juvenile detention center on the same day and, with nothing in common, they become tangled by yearning, shared visualizations of flight to an imagined world, and a murder of another boy inside the stockade that results in one dead and the other pleading guilty to the carnage. It's a murder mystery of young incarcerated men in lust, seen through surreal composition on sets of darkness and illumination and the simplest trace of detail.

Two detectives try to expose the indictment. "Why did this trigger it?" One of them questions as to why the inmate would lead this course of self-ruin and devastation, seeing a rainbow. "Only he himself knows." In the humankind that judges people under the duplicitous laws prearranged as a result of a perversely archaic edition of religious principles, Miike bares violence in its most honest form, as an instinctive undertaking. It cannot be made clear further than the surface of palpable means of interaction. It's too mysterious and puzzling for anyone beyond of the person perpetrating the action to entirely grasp. Sexual friction and short-tempered violence propel the story to its mind-blowing outcome.

Takashi Miike puts his heart and soul into his fascinating visual actualization of the morally ambiguous story, which is heavily reminiscent of Jean Genet novels like Our Lady of the Flowers. It is avant-garde theater translated onto film, voice-over and screened words as the literal point of view of the investigators. The film is punctuated by wonderful, infectious closing music, and you realize you have just experienced film-making in a unique manner, a conspicuous trance consisting of definite colors alive in the bounds of a vast universe of an unlit void. Thick with striking images like pyramids, a classic sci-fi rocket ship, and an opening dance sequence coming unexpectedly. That's just the tip of the iceberg to all of the creative dexterity Miike affords the viewer.

One may come from this film thinking that it wasn't about the story. That's an understandable way to put it, put it is not quite correct. Really, in order to be a narrative at all, it can only be about the story, but Miike does not betray the sheer weight of the story's content and ideas. Can there have been a simpler depiction of it? The film, essentially, is about existence. It is a concept spanning 4.6 billion years! Miike, who normally makes cynical if not outright self-deprecating microcosmic yakuza and horror movies, has aggregating all of those impressions into a claustrophobic, life-refracting prism of all the world's details and creates a blemish on the face of the world of cinema that audaciously, patiently, calculatedly tackles humankind and the self-worth behind which it hides, self-worth largely created by the belief in God, which this film could be read as implicating doesn't exist. The movie's likely metaphors for evolution and faith have very telling differences in outcome, as the movie's symbolic image of evolution augments and that of religious conviction remains the way it has since the beginning. The movie is only an agent for the viewer to perceive on their terms, however confined to the film's implications. Miike is correct: This is his masterpiece.

Beautiful and haunting art-house with a veneer of a prison movie: that is the best description of a movie that is so invested in its self referential imagery that the viewer is either swept away into it or completely alienated. The sets are often minimal, echoing some modern theater and also giving an extra emphasis to the characters as such. Golden light pervades the dreamy scenery of cramped cells, geometrically shaped insides and an odd pyramid and an equally surprising space rocket that can be seen from the roof of the prison.

At the surface the movie is a crime investigation in which two policemen try to unravel the events behind the murder of an inmate since the confession of the presumed killer does not seem to match reality. But that is an excuse for a lavishly artistic movie to structure itself around a plot that gives coherence to the surreal approach so that overall it does not veer into fantasy. Which is not to say that this is a linear movie because it most definitely is not. Flashbacks mingle with fantasy and the feeling of displaced narrative is inherent to the nihilism of the content.

Ryuhei Matsuda's performance adds much to the not quite overt sensuality of it all. Emotions are stifled, dialogues are left open ended, interpretations are left hanging in the air and ultimately unanswered. And that seems to be the heart of this movie: solving the crime does not advance a psychological answer to the problem of human interaction or lack thereof. Kazuki is something of a social outcast and Arioshi's obsession with him the only bridge to any kind of human contact. The sexual tension adds another level to the already pressing claustrophobia.

In the end, not even the re-visitation of some lines of dialogue that provide a context is able of truly answering anything. The viewer is left to make some sense of what happened and to fill in the gaps, an attempt that may very well be absolutely impossible. After all, the movie is fragmented in essence, deliberately so. A telling scene is when a shaft of sunlight pierces through Arioshi as an arrow and blood seeps out. Like the movie it is somewhat factual and yet full of meanings that need be projected unto it: a literal metaphor.

The ethereally beautiful Ryuhei Matsuda plays Jun Ariyoshill, sent to an impossibly photogenic juvenile detention centre after he kills and subsequently horrifically mutilates a guy after a one-night stand. Although the movie contains some startling imagery (Juns heart pierced by a ray of sunlight, the warden's office within a picture frame, the seductively geometric communal cells) I found it difficult to stay with this extraordinary piece of cinema. Part of my mind was screaming emperor's new clothes! whilst my visual cortex was being lovingly massaged. You can forget about conventional plotting character development and expository dialogue for, as one review I read said "its a Miike film" -what do you expect? Well, if you expect to be; Frustrated. Confused. Misdirected. but also Awed. Startled. Exhilarated & Exhausted. This will be right up your street. And if you can't tell whether I liked it or not -that's probably because I can't either, but Im sure as hell going to find it hard to lose some of the weird, seductive images that this movies left in my brain.