Yakuza Horror Theater: Gozu
***½/****
starring Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino, Keiko Tomita
screenplay by Sakichi Soto
directed by Takashi Miike
by Bill Chambers I've sat here staring at a flashing cursor, wondering what to write about Takashi Miike's Gozu–a picture whose spirit harks back to the David Lynch of Eraserhead–that could persuade you to see it: Though Gozu begs a viewing, any description likely to pique one's interest would force you to pre-emptively pass moral judgment on a film that a) explicitly requests to be taken as a joke, and b) is too fecund to truly offend. Gozu begins with the over-the-top murder of a "Yakuza attack dog" the size of a purse; Ozaki (Shô Aikawa), the perpetrator, is stopped before shooting the driver of a "Yakuza attack car" by his closest "brother," Minami (Hideki Sone). Escorting Ozaki across the Japanese countryside to a Yakuza meeting, Minami, fearing further consequences of Ozaki's mental breakdown, plans to ditch his passenger in a small town along the way. Instead, he accidentally kills Ozaki, Ozaki's corpse disappears, and Minami reluctantly enlists the aid of the ultra-eccentric locals (including a man whose "missing pigment" transforms his face into a Kabuki enigma) in finding his presumed-dead friend. I'm amazed by how cut-and-dry it all sounds in a recap, considering that not a second of Gozu, not a line of dialogue, is easy to predict–with the possible exception of the gimmick of the lactating woman repeated from Miike's Visitor Q. As in Visitor Q as well, Miike threatens hommage to Takeshi Kitano, but Gozu most significantly moves that film's discussion of motherhood into the natal realm to arrive at a climax that goes through with what Martin Scorsese had planned for After Hours before the studio put the kibosh on it. Gozu (which means "cow head") suggests that the prolific Miike–the director of nine films in 2002 alone–has grown fond of the extended-family dynamic from practically living on a movie set; the film's stirring fraternal uplift is matched and tempered only by its witty, extreme grotesqueries. Programme: Midnight Madness
