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Kiri kiri kiri kiri...
Resurrecting this topic cos I just watched the DVD last night and feel as if I have been hit by two stout planks.
In defense of Will, I found Mike Leigh's Naked extremely disturbing—not so much for the main story of Johnny's rambles, as for the sadistic games-playing back in the girls' flat: there was something about the vacuous giggle of that amoral toff that gave me the shivers.
But the final third of Audition, where you're never quite sure what's "real" and what's not, is the closest thing I've ever scene to a pure cinematic rendering of the nightmare state: the unexplained shifts in location, the way that people turn into other people, the utter implausibility of Asami's motivations and methods—all had that inexorable dream logic.
Asami came off as some sort of vengeful force, yes: but vengeance for what? Aoyama was not a bad guy at heart—clueless, yeah, but certainly not heartless. The rush of images, though, suggests that he feels guilty about and ashamed of his sexual impulses and his fleeting fantasies—about the girl his son brings home, about his secretary (did she ever "really" give him a blowjob? maybe so, maybe no—but her behavior certainly indicates some sort of sexual tension between the two)... but the "punishment" far exceeds what is appropriate for the "crime."
D, who knows a little about these things, finds Audition squarely in the tradition of Japanese ghost stories, where revenants deal out cruel and inexplicable vengeance for obscure reasons. And there's some suggestion of that: Asami is always dressed in white (the color of death, in Japanese semiotics), and seems to move at will, to exist without the need for food or money.
Also well in the tradition of Japanese ghost stories (and Western psychic research) is the notion that violent or unnatural events may leave a "scar," a mark on the surface of reality, and that proximity to a person or place thus scarred can trigger a psychic impression in a person. Thus we get Aoyama seeing things he could not possibly have "really" seen: did he "really" meet Asami's stepfather? was there "really" a passerby explaining the murder at the Stone Fish bar? was he ever "really" in Asami's apartment?
And consider what happens when she's thrown down the stairs at the end (and remember, she says she was thrown down the stairs as a child): there's that strange pulsing in her neck, as if something is trying to get out—and then she starts repeating phrases she used in her courtship with Aoyama: like a tape unspooling, like a CD skipping, like HAL at the end of 2001 burbling out random fragments of memory.
I don't know how much of the film we're supposed to accept as "real"—everything after Asami and Aoyama make love, and maybe before, is suspect. (D said, "The disjointedness of the last half seems indicative of a psychotic break." I asked, "Whose? Aoyama's, or Asami's?" She laughed and said, "The filmmaker's!")
Interesting how scenes would recur in flashback, but would be different—when Asami talks about how she was abused as a child, for instance: why were we not shown this the first time around? Why is it that Aoyama (our viewpoint character) seems to be receiving this information for the first time? Did he hear it in the initial conversation, but ignored it, as he ignored so many other red flags, in his love-blind state? Or is he just now receiving the psychic impression of just how damaged Asami is, and in his drug-induced fugue state, incorporating this information into an existing memory in order to process it?
In the end, of course, question about what "really" happened are beside the point—but it makes for a fascinating mental exercise. Touchstones: Bergman's Persona and Cries and Whispers, Polanski's Repulsion, Ozu's Woman in the Dunes. |
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