Re-Viewing (or: A beautiful film about love)

Tom Mes writes about reviewing, re-viewing and re-reviewing Miike Takashi’s ichi the killer.

The first time I watched Miike Takashi’s ichi the killer was in 2002 at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The director and his star Asano Tadanobu were in attendance. Major press event: press conference, photo shoot, countless interviews and a stressed-out publicist always hovering around. Even the interpreter who normally shuns Miike like the plague agreed to cooperate.
‘Why do you show so much violence in your films?’

As the days progressed, Miike and Asano turned that most obvious and chronically recurring of questions into an excuse for a comedy routine held at the expense of the guileless journalists in front of them. The other interpreter, the one who does dig Miike (they go out for beers whenever the former is in Tokyo), plays his role as judicious translator with verve.
Violence, violence, violence.
Walkouts, walkouts, walkouts.
(I go to see all three screenings of the film during the festival.)
ichi the killer proves hard to take for many.
Even the horror hounds among the journos and critics dislike the film for the relentless onslaught it offers of people inflicting and receiving pain on and from each other.
I attempt an analysis for my book agitator: the cinema of takashi miike, balancing precariously, not unlike protagonist Kakihara on the ledge during the film’s final scene. Fortunately, I don’t fall. Or if I did, I haven’t noticed yet.
That was nine years ago.

[Shot of laundry fluttering on a clothes line.]

Films have this wonderful quality of changing along with the person watching them. We go through life, changing mentally and physically. Having gone through those changes, we watch again a film that we last saw when it was still on general release, on a big screen, on a Friday night date or on a rainy weekday afternoon while skipping school. And the film has somehow changed with us. New qualities surface, weaknesses have become strengths.

Beauty
I watch ichi the killer again nine years later. Not at a buzzing festival in a sold-out theater that will be two-thirds empty by the time the credits roll, but alone, on DVD and on a standard-size, mono TV from the pre-flatscreen era.
But what I see is beauty.
ichi the killer must be one of the most beautiful films from Japan or any part of the world in the past fifteen years. "Plasticity" is a term rarely used in English (unlike in French), but it is magnificently applicable when talking about ichi the killer. The unreality of the film is breathtaking.
Starting with the CGI. This film has often been criticized for its "bad" computer graphics — supposedly meaning that these effects do not look realistic enough. This came from people who believe that there are absolute criteria by which one can judge all films. How wrong they are.
Since when is "unrealistic" a bad thing anyway?
‘The object of art is not simple truth but complex beauty’, wrote Oscar Wilde.
Complex beauty is the very fabric of ichi the killer, like the hues in Asano Tadanobu’s iridescent costume during the film’s rooftop finale, which make his every gesture ripple off into the air and affect the atoms that surround him.
Like the lines in Tsukamoto Shinya’s grinning face.
Like the multilingual actress called Alien whose performance is as unreal as the CGI.
Like the all-seeing crow perched on the lamppost. (Is that Kakihara’s severed tongue he snatches out of the boy’s hands?)
Like the battered hooker stripping, slowly, out of embarrassment, before revealing her grotesquely bruised face. (In some circles "grotesque" has a negative meaning, when it is in fact another manifestation of beauty.)
Am I just getting off on aestheticized violence, like Ichi leaving his semen on the balcony floor? Man is capable of creating beautiful works of art about ugly things. See Charles Baudelaire. Beauty is not so much in "what" is portrayed as in "how". And never mind "why". When it’s really good, what and how meld into one, and why is replaced by because. Like with ichi the killer, whose most important questions are never answered. The motivations that drive its narrative are never explained. Therefore the action in itself is all that matters. As Miike Takashi wrote in his on-set diary about discovering that Asano had bleached his armpit hair for the role of Kakihara: ‘It’s meaninglessly beautiful. To wonder why is useless.’

According to its director, ichi the killer is a film about love. Love and pain certainly do not exclude each other. Violence and pain are the best methods to achieve such elevated heights of artistic brilliance where what and how blend into one. See Oscar Wilde again, the picture of dorian gray in this case, with its constant interplay of violence and beauty. "To hurt" is one of the few verbs in the English language that is both transitive and intransitive: giver and receiver are not differentiated. And what is not different is the same. Kakihara is ultra-masochistic but turns extremely sadistic because his masochistic needs are not satisfied. In the end he is nevertheless left hurting.
Violence is a many splendored and splintered thing. 13 assassins, Miike’s latest film (as of this writing), is a retread of ichi the killer intended for a larger audience. Both films show and tell the complexity of portraying violence in the cinema: its many uses, the contrasting and conflicting emotions it can evoke, its real-life nastiness, its aptness for cartoon-like exaggeration. ichi the killer is the spiraling version, 13 assassins the linear. The former all confusion, the latter all motivation. This is the only explanation last year’s Venice jury and its president could possibly get away with for not giving Miike Takashi the Best Director prize. I doubt it came up in their deliberations.

PS: If all of the above makes no sense, perhaps it will in nine years.

Tom Mes

Tom Mes is author of Agitator: The Cinema Of Takashi Miike and the upcoming Re-Agitator: Ten Years Of Writing On Takashi Miike (FAB Press).