Izo

I was expecting a samurai film, I couldn't have been wronger. It is hard to explain "Izo" with just words, even if I could I don't think it would cover all the things this film has to say.

Before explaining the story of this film I think it is essential to talk about the visual aspect of it. "Izo" looks like another experimental film from the director Takashi Miike, lots of unorthodox camera shots and visual story telling. Acting feels very theatrical... in a Japanese way. There is no stopping in this film, it is a fast ride from start to the end and you have to catch up with it.

As for the story, Izo is the main character in this, a samurai from feudal Japan who apparently had a lot of drama in his life. After his death his tortured soul wanders around modern and old Japan, endlessly taking lives. He denies the existence of God, faces old foes, those who hold grudge against him, sleeps with his mom and kills her, he sees women he had been with, kills them, kills lots of women, kills lots of everything actually. And the whole Japan -modern and old- wants to stop this guy, he is seen as a menace to the system, he doesn't belong to the system. And he travels back and forth in time, fighting and killing everyone that gets in his way, slowly turning into a demon.

There is a lot of defiance in "Izo", against everything human civilization stands for. Its purpose apparently is to question that which made us what we are. Where does religion, law, ethics come from? And it has a very nihilist answer to all of it. While watching this I felt a lot of mythology in it, feels like a Greek or a Persian tragedy.

What I've written might sound non-sense if you haven't yet seen this and have no idea what it is like but this is as much as I can do to explain this film. I think that's what makes good art: It speaks for itself...

The latest chapter in Takeshi Miike's continuing essay on humanity and brutality, IZO is a two-hour experimental mind-trip.

If this film were in any way concerned with making sense, the storyline might resemble something like this: A man is brutally murdered in ancient Japan, but, bearing his vengeance, he returns to the Earth and wanders uncontrollably through time and space, becoming the embodiment of mankind's self-destructive nature. Throughout his wanderings, he encounters all kinds of strange and metaphoric characters, and he proceeds to kill them all with his samurai sword.

This film is an elaborate thesis on mankind, but the exact nature of the message is a matter of debate, as is whether or not Takeshi Miike himself even has a clue. There will no doubt be differing opinions as to what the characters represent, but you better make up your mind during the first hour of film. After that, most of the scenes that obviously point out a social message - like black-and-white footage of war - disappear, and what the resolution is depends on your interpretation of the characters.

For those of you not familiar with the works of Takeshi Miike, suffice it to say that he is determined to mine the human subconscious in search of new and exciting ways to make people throw up sushi and tempura on the carpeted floors of Tokyo multiplexes. Among Japan's pantheon of ultra-violent directors, he is notable for being always ready to address the issue of his own sadism. Ever film he makes is like an expansion of Hitchcock's shower scene, forcibly accusing us of being sadists at the same time as he delivers great images of cinematic violence. More than the social commentary, which is confusing and likely uncertain, the most interesting philosophical study in IZO is Miike's self-examination of his own lust for violence, as well as the main character's and the audience's. Is Izo so brutal because he is inhuman, or because he is too human?

You may not get anything from straining at this befuddled movie, but it is still enjoyable and provoking, if not gut-wrenching, experimental cinema. Any violent philosophical essay that features long shots of a folk singer playing guitar and screaming ballads is worth a look. IZO has elements of Kafka, Lewis Carrol, Terry Gilliam, and Seijun Suzuki, but it is undeniably Takeshi Miike.

You can call Miike sadistic. You can call him demented or depraved. Just don't forget to call him an artist.

After watching perhaps the most reckless, surreal, mystical-style take on the ultra-bloody grind-house samurai epic, I'm not too sure who is more relentless, its main character- the unstoppable un-dead/spirit Izo (Kazuya Nakayama, likely in the performance of a career, for better &/or worse) or its director Takashi Miike. It's been compared to both Greek mythology and Jodorowsky's El Topo, and I can definitely see credence in both examples. In the first half hour to forty five minutes, actually longer if you account for, um, story, you're not sure precisely what the hell (no pun intended) is going on. Izo, at the start, gets crucified, and then we learn after a while (err, it's pretty obvious) he was quite the warrior and swordsman, who is out for vengeance as he comes back as an un-crushable spirit. Later on, we get a view into what tags along with him, in a female form, as a 'fragment', but for the most part one can only try to assume that Izo is on a collision course to nowhere, a pure embodiment of nihilistic anarchy who could be the Terminator in blood-eyed samurai garb if he/it actually had the mission.

I can't deny that Miike deserves an 'A' for effort on this sort of thing, but it's also the kind of project that veers the closest of all the work I've seen of his so far to that most overused of terms- pretentious (albeit I haven't dug deep enough into his oeuvre to make that definitive). I mean, really, what are we to make of cut-aways at varied, completely random times of newsreel footage of dictators and famous world wars and atom bombs going off in black and white, sometimes in reverse mode, or in sped-up mode? What about a guy who comes in and out of the (very loosely laid) story to do acoustic-guitar musical numbers? It does all connect, I suppose, to the sort of random madness and almost Superman-like ability to not get really that harmed, unless around his quasi-kryptonite of the order of the 'Soul-fragment'. A lot of what ends up popping up as sort of the history of Izo, before he was turned into the ultimate grudge with a sword, would be really interesting on its own, but strung together like this with the rest of the picture made it frustrating for me. Perhaps I wasn't ready enough for all of this, but for all of the virtuosity that Miike is going for with his bloody, full-blown surreal odyssey, only some of it works well while the rest falls into 'huh' mode.

But the rest of this picture is what's almost teasingly ironic about Izo. As a swordplay movie, the kind that delivers the goods on action set-pieces and violence galore, doesn't disappoint, and if anything it shows Miike knows this kind of picture, which is why in a sense he's probably trying to lampoon it underneath the very dark and Gothic exterior. Nakayama is a real force to be reckoned with, and he works well in his all-too-limited role. It's always hard to do variations on the same style of killing- slicing a sword in the blink of an eye, and sometimes seeing the (appropriately) blood-soaked and flesh-torn aftermath, or in an immediate cut-away- and Miike pulls out his entire arsenal of tricks, including a set piece with the one American actor- Bob Sapp- who barely puts up a front either despite his huge size. But even with the creativity in many of Izo's murder sequences jarring and excitingly outrageous, the repetition becomes a little tiresome. And it wasn't that the picture was too confusing, though it does contain that side of the El Topo, where it's basically intentional for it to go in circle's around people's heads.

The messages that barrage the viewer though through the content (like in one scene where Izo is at a school and you-guess-what happens and there are cutaways to classrooms where kids are asked to define 'love', 'nation', and other ultra big words taken for granted) are what become fuzzy or just too off-kilter for their own good. For someone who is usually so sharp on the edge with satire, Miike here is trying to scrape up enough with the action to justify it being there, because, of course, Izo's world is in some otherworldly plain of Greek tragedy, Buddhism, and other factions that are also connected to the true depravities and horrors of the world. But it's too much on one plate, and there's definitely the sense of overload. It's the kind of picture where the director does, more often than not, stumble on his face with his own ambitions; that being said, I'd much rather see a movie by Miike that only reaches up so high to its ideals than for a lesser filmmaker to just churn out typical product. Izo is anything but typical product, and it follows no rules (and destroys much like its character), which becomes part of the problem, at least on a first viewing.

The Philadelphia Film Fest program guide described the plot of IZO as such:

"A samurai travels through time with just one goal: to kill every single human on the planet."

That basically sums it up. A man takes a sword and hacks away at nearly all the people he comes in contact with. He stabs a military general to death with the help of some zombie soldiers. He slices his own mother's body in half from the waist down. He kills some kids, he kills some businessmen, and he kills a real estate agent who turns out to be a vampiric demon. When he kills infinity (yes, infinity ITSELF, not an infinite number of people) and the movie STILL doesn't end, things start to get a little tedious.

Knowing Miike, you'd be right to expect some outlandish violence, a high body count, and perhaps a mind-boggling plot from all of this. What you might not anticipate is a lot of philosophical mumbo jumbo, World War II stock footage played backwards and forwards, and a guitar player who appears every so often to sing throatily about elephants and flowers. (At one point the camera lingers on this guitarist's face for a full SEVEN MINUTES or so without any cuts or camera movement.)

Though I think I may have liked Izo, I have many criticisms.

First of all, for a film about sword-fighting, IZO lacks both the beauty of HERO and the direct outrageousness of KILL BILL. Quite simply, the fights were poorly choreographed and involved too many cheesy stunts. Izo flies over his enemies a few times, just like the characters in CROUCHING TIGER flew, only less elegantly. Izo dodges a bullet in slow motion just like Neo did in the MATRIX. The sound of a heart beating played over fade-ins and fade-outs just like it does in every made-for-TV horror flick in existence. During the rare times when Miike WASN'T deploying effects that have already been clichéd for years, each sequence seemed to go like this:

1. Close up of Izo's face 2. Close up of other guy's face 3. Shot from behind other guy as Izo hits him in the stomach with sword 4. Close up of other guy falling down

For the first ten minutes I didn't mind the lack of special effects or variety, but once I realized that there wouldn't be any progression and that the film would go on like this for a full two hours, I began to feel rather antsy.

The repetitive fight scenes could have been alleviated by some decent cinematography. If you can't give me an engaging plot, at LEAST give me something interesting to look at! But no. The whole movie had a very sloppy vibe, as though it had been rushed through production. Many of the shots seemed haphazardly composed or not composed at all, like arbitrary shots of tree branches and jittery hand-held action footage. Indoor shots were often over-exposed by light coming in from the windows but otherwise under-exposed. I sometimes had the sensation that brief flashes of stock footage were inserted to make up for gaps in continuity. Also, it could be that I saw a worn print, but the first half of the movie had a very brown, drab feel. Perhaps some sharp color could have livened things up.

So yes, the movie was boring, ugly and maybe an EL TOPO rip-off, but somehow I thought it was good anyway. Part of my positive opinion stems from the fact that I admire any director who has a dream and achieves it, no matter how wrong they may be to do so. Also, intellectually, this IS a very engaging film. Since Izo is so unrealistic as a character, the viewer is practically forced to understand his journey as an allegory. In my opinion, Izo represents the grudge mentality: when someone hurts him, or acts like they want to hurt him, he always reacts swiftly and lethally. When a person ignores him or approaches him in kindness (like the schoolteacher, a few of the women, or the children of the future who have learned that nations do not really exist), he lets them pass without harm. His general aim is to destroy anyone who claims to have more power than he does, including the Prime Minister and God. Through juxtapositions with World War II footage, we see that Izo's attitude is linked with Japan's stance during World War II: surrender is dishonorable, but by not surrendering, one is only asking for more violence. In order to stop war, one must cease to threaten it, thereby undercutting the formation of a grudge.

While watching IZO, I felt like I would understand the details better if I were more familiar with Japanese traditions and culture. My feeling was correct. After probing around the internet, I learned that Izo was a true historical figure, a samurai-turned-homicidal maniac. I also learned that the unusual style of music played by the guitarist (fanciful lyrics, anguished voice) is a distinctive Japanese genre that emerged after World War II in response to all the suffering.

Still, I would not recommend IZO lightly, not even to Miike fans. I'm not sure if the film is brilliant or terrible, but overall... life is short and IZO is long. Watch it only if you have the time or patience for such an undertaking.

I've seen my share of Lynch, Cronenberg, Tsukamoto, and other Miike films in the past, and I must say for a fact that IZO beats everything else currently out there for extreme bizarreness.

After watching the film for 2 hours, there was still a lot of head scratching from the audience leaving the theater. What did it mean? What exactly happened? What was the purpose? But do you expect any less from Takashi Miike?

As what I gathered, an assassin named IZO is crucified as punishment, from what we don't know, probably a few hundred years ago. His punishment instead goes beyond multiple spearings through his body, but eternal damnation of life, where time, space, and dimension are not clear.

It seems IZO has the capability of traveling through random times and space, but randomly out of nowhere. He kills whoever may be in his path, as they are trying to kill him. The purpose of his eternal damnation is not truly clear and he seeks on a Reason. A Reason in a place where Reason doesn't exist.

Add to the package a Huge body count (not as bloody as you would expect actually), some sex, samurai and cartoonish violence, random old stock footage, zombies, a randomly appearing folk singer giving metaphoric songs on occasion, snakes, caterpillars, and birth itself, it is one unique picture.

Did I get it? Nope. Did I enjoy it? I think I did. A second viewing is what I must give it eventually. 8/10