A Film Canon

Audition has become notorious for its depiction of graphic torture, and is frequently listed with the new canon of unwatchable films ushered in by the advent of torture porn horror. What's extraordinary about the film, though, is that its notorious torture sequence only takes up about ten minutes, towards the end, and even then is largely presented indirectly, as the culmination of an incredible slow build that takes up the majority of the film, and revels in lush, atmospheric, meditative suspense. On the one hand, it's a kind of Japanese take on neo-noir, replete with a Hitchcockian sense of mystery - "I can't put my finger on it, but there's something wrong with her" - and devolving, in the second act, into a peripatetic procedural, a melancholy wandering, during which the camera angles become more distorted, and the editing more jagged, finding their correlative in a tilted crime scene, in which a poorly designed floor causes blood to seep out from under a door. On the other hand, and even more strikingly, it's one of the greatest and most idiosyncratic cinematic appreciations of Ozu, as Ozu's perennial narrative of arranged marriage is updated into that of a marriage audition, in which widower and producer Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) strikes up a deal with another producer to audition actresses for a new television program, and secretly audition them for the role of his girlfriend. This might be expected to play like a materialist Ozu - and, indeed, Ozu's transcendent 180-degree conversational-shot is comically reimagined as the two sides of the interview process - but in fact seems more preoccupied with continuing Ozu's late movement from transcendence to immanence, and capturing whatever might be considered proto-digital in those last few films. As a result, a great deal of the film feels like an attempt to pair Ozu's aesthetic with a digital, occasionally handheld cinematography - and Miike has a similar gift for shooting and framing interiors, imbuing every space with a residual, cavernous emptiness, textured by melancholy intrusions of Western culture. Nevertheless, the film also begs the question of what Ozu might mean in a sexually liberated society - or, more simply, how Ozu might shoot a sex scene - and it's here that Miike's characteristic darkness comes into its own, literalising Ozu's trademark pillow shots as the springboards for a nightmarish collision of fantasy and reality that unsettles immersion and identification, as evinced in a tendency towards disarming, near invisible, and ostensibly redundant jump cuts. Similarly, the candidate who most successfully gives the impression of being a "properly trained person" - as opposed to a "successful professional" - is Asami (Eihi Shiina), a professional ballerina who's just suffered a hip injury that prevents her ever dancing again. Asami's most impressive attribute is her decorum and etiquette - in some ways, she feels about fifty years older than the other characters - and so it's appropriate that her thwarted ballet career is deflected into, or explicated by, her subsequent addiction to extreme torture, insofar as it presents etiquette - and Ozu's own presentation and embodiment of it - as a piece of tortuous choreography, an effort to forestall perversion that ends up becoming a perversion itself. By presenting Ozu, and everything he stands for, as a pervert, Miike essentially continues the appreciative project of In The Realm Of The Senses, continuing its evolution of the tatami-shot, and ceremonial centrality of the floor, but less by presenting the floor as a sexual surface than as a torture table; or, alternatively, by equating it with the digital, fluid surface of the film itself. It makes sense, then, that Asami's torture of Shigemaru should take place as an aestheticised, traditionally-inflected testing of a hyper-sensitive surface - after giving Shigeharu an injection that debilitates him, while increasing the sensitivity of his nerve endings, she administers a series of pins to his body, in a perverse acupuncture that transforms him into a gleaming artefact. It's a gesture that's continuous with the fishing rods that Shigemaru and his son thrust into a convulsive sea, in the opening scene, or the incense sticks burning in liquid that texture the atmosphere, just as Shigemaru's facial contortions, and the final condensation of the torture to his face, is continuous with the various efforts to save face that he's previously attempted - and both are indices of the fine net of etiquette that Miike manages to cast across the quivering surface of the film, and its stark reminder that "to live means to approach death gradually".