Past Misdeeds: Kokkuri-san (1997)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu), a Japanese schoolgirl in her late teens, lives alone with her older sister. Without the knowledge of her friends - who lose at voice recognition - the girl also stars in a well-loved late night talk show, where she is "Michiru", a construct of late teen wish-fulfilment whose life is full of sex and adventure, quite unlike Mio's actual one.

Mio has never gotten over an experience in her childhood when her mother tried to drown her, but only drowned herself, and is now emotionally distant and obviously chronically depressed. She has a few friends, at least, Masami (Moe Ishikawa) and Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada). Both are about as lively and happy as Mio herself. Hiroko (I surmise) has never been quite alright since a childhood friend of hers drowned, and identifies Mio with her dead friend, while we are never made privy to any hints for Masami's behaviour. Secretly, Mio is in love with Hiroko, but is never able to talk with her friend about it.

Though they are nominally friends, Hiroko and Masami don't see eye to eye. They are in a passive-aggressive (and with girls this affectless the emphasis lies on the passive part) fight about a boy perfectly void of a personality.

Still, the three girls decide to have a séance, based on an idea they got from Mio's radio show. They do this by means of playing a game called "kokkuri". Working with a home-made Ouija board and using a girl ghost named Kokkuri as a guide, the girls at first just play around a little, but their questions soon turn uncomfortable. Questioned when Michiru (Mio's alter ego her friends aren't clever enough to connect to her at this point) will die, Kokkuri tells them "at 17"; Mio will turn 18 the same month.

Masami uses the session also as a way to continue her boy feud with Hiroko, until they come to blows, or at least as much to blows as they are able.

After the séance, things begin to get weird. Mio begins to have visions of a girl in a red dress that might be Hiroko's dead childhood friend or her dead self or Kokkuri or all three. Hiroko disappears, only to appear shortly after - but worse for wear - at Mio's, only to disappear again after an argument.

Takashi (or Takahisa, depending on who transcribes the name) Zeze is probably best known for his stark and rather depressing art house-minded pink movies, but as every good director working in genre movies (may they be arty or not), he also put(s) some time in other genres. Kokkuri-san is nominally a horror film, it is however the type of horror film that will just confuse anyone looking for "scares".

The horror here is of a more existential kind. The supernatural isn't there to menace the characters from the outside, but functions as a magnifying glass that helps the viewer see the characters' wounds more clearly, or as a mirror so that the characters can see themselves more clearly. How honest the mirror might be is quite a different question. Zeze uses a doppelganger motif, and as is often the case with it, there's always a certain amount of confusion when it comes to the question if the doppelganger is just more honest about someone's traits or only showing their most destructive urges.

Thematically, Zeze works the same field as in most of his pink films. Kokkuri-san is fixated on alienation, the freezing effects of trauma and the inability to show one's feelings, possibly even the inability to understand one's own feelings. I say "possibly" because Zeze abstains from any closeness to his characters. Like the camera, which tends to keep its distance from the proceedings before it, the viewer isn't truly allowed to get too close to anyone here. Getting inside anyone's head, or identifying completely with any single character seems unthinkable. Even when the viewer shares Mio's visions, the film still keeps up the feeling of distance. The audience is allowed to watch, and to think, even to build sensible theories, but it can never truly know what's going on inside the characters.

At times, I can't help but think that Zeze revels a little too much in being ambiguous. I don't think that empathy based on understanding between people is impossible, something the director seems to disagree with.

When characters are never completely knowable, plot becomes even less so, and although Kokkuri-san's plot makes a lot of thematic sense, someone looking for any form of excitement will be sorely disappointed. It wouldn't be too difficult to argue that everything we see takes place in Mio's head, and that there isn't anything happening "in the real world" apart from (possibly) a teenage double suicide. If you are looking for clarity, or action, you're probably not made for watching Zeze's kind of cinema.

You'll also want to avoid Kokkuri-san when you can't take artistic products of a deeply pessimist worldview, where people's isolation is never broken so completely that they'll be able to live a life of actual closeness to others, and where the only way to connect lies in death. Though I think that the Hollywood way of looking at alienation or trauma and the simple solutions the films even acknowledging their existence offer are deeply insulting to the way actual people are feeling and going through their lives, I can't say that I find Zeze's view of life any more tenable. Of course, his films' hopelessness is probably much closer to the way his characters relate to the world around them, and might even be a method to force the audience into a state of understanding and empathy exactly by refusing it easy ways to empathize. In a way, this seems to me something that more closely amounts to a real act of violence against the audience than most simulated violence on screen does (sorry, Miss Clover).

As you might have realized by now, I find Kokkuri-san in its own, unassuming way much more troubling than many films which are much better at being generic horror films. There's a cloud of stark dread hanging over the film I find deeply affecting. It's not a feeling everyone seeing Zeze's film will share. Some of you might be bored (because honestly, there isn't really much happening here), some confused (because honestly, "ambiguous" and "obtuse" are closely related concepts), and some just plain annoyed (because honestly, the film is so bleak even the idea of people smiling must be preposterous to Zeze).

On WTF: Kokkuri-san (1997)

Everybody loves the films of Takashi/Takahisa Zeze, right? From time to time, the art house pinku master dips his toes into slightly different pools like the horror movie.

But don't worry, as my review on WTF-Film.com will show, a Zeze horror film is just as bleak and depressing as his softcore films.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,other places,reviews,takashi zeze,horror,depression on celluloid,ayumi yamatsu

Raigyo (1997)

Noriko (Moe Sakura) absconds from the hospital where she is being treated for her pancreatitis. Dressed in black and carrying a knife and the photo of a child in her handbag, she drifts through the outskirts of a Japanese industrial town, trying to connect to either her husband who is now living with another woman or the lover she betrayed her husband with or both via phone - as in many things, the film isn't forthcoming with clear explanations for what is going on.

At the same time, Yanai, an office worker who takes a day off from work to sleep around while his wife lies in pregnant in hospital, is desperately trying to find one among the astounding number of women prepared for a quick fuck in his little brown notebook actually willing to indulge the sleazy bastard.

When Noriko has been rejected completely and Yanai doesn't find any woman willing to put up with him, a dating hotline connects the two lost souls. They meet up, and after a short bit of sex, Noriko stabs and strangles him to death in the shower of a cheap motel.

The police suspect her of the murder, but aren't able to prove anything. The only witnesses who have seen Noriko and Yanai together are a mentally handicapped girl and a gas station attendant (Takeshi Ito?). The latter would very well be able to identify her, yet chooses not to, so that he can ask her for an explanation how it feels to kill someone, hoping for closure for the traumatic death of a child in his past, or perhaps something else he isn't able to grasp or articulate.

Raigyo's director Takashi Zeze is known for his especially bleak variation of the pinku, and this austere but strangely beautiful drama should be proof enough.

The film is set in the bleakest part of the Japanese province, an industrial area where nature itself seems contaminated by humanity's presence. Long shots of dead fish and sickly green and yellow places abide, putting the characters into a setting that is nearly empty of humans but without any of the calming influences of nature.

Places like these can only be populated by people unable to connect, to their own emotions, to each other, to the world or even the motives for their own actions. Raigyo does the same thing many other of the art-minded pinku films do for Tokyo, namely making its provincial location look like a place where sex and death seem to be the only possible ways for people to connect to each other or themselves. Yet even these things don't seem to bring any peace of mind to Raigyo's characters.

Zeze treats his characters much like parts of the landscape, letting the viewer gaze calmly at them from the outside, but never inviting her into their heads. The way he never provides any direct information about the characters' inner lives might be infuriating to some; I found that it perfectly mirrored the disconnection between the film characters and the world they inhabit.

At the same time, the actors, especially Moe Sakura (and that's a bizarre name in the context of this film if I ever heard one), very ably project the feeling that there is much more to their characters than there appears to be - quite possibly much more than they themselves are conscious of. We as viewers are never given enough knowledge of their inner life to make a completely coherent picture, just as in real life.

All this might sound like an exceptionally depressing experience, and it certainly isn't the sort of film that makes you want to party, or live much longer, but at the same time Zeze finds a weirdly abstract and appropriately numb core of beauty in the bleakness of his film's locations. It is as if through the act of looking at them, the corruption of nature and the disconnectedness of things don't lose their terror, yet somehow gain a quality you can't help but appreciate.

However, if you appreciate this quality too much, you might possibly end up like one of Zeze's characters.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,pinku,drama,takashi zeze,moe sakura