Model Eihi Shiina makes a stunning debut in Takashi Miike’s Audition
AUDITION (ÔDISHON) (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens July 3
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
When Audition opened in 1999 at Film Forum, it was New Yorkers’ major introduction to the work of Japanese director Takashi Miike — and some cineastes ran out of the theater faster than they lined up around the block to get in in the first place. The shocking, unconventional psychosexual horror classic, which won the FIPRESCI Prize and the KNF Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, is now back in a 2K twentieth-anniversary restoration that will likely have people lining up at Metrograph, where it opens July 3. But this is a different (#MeToo, social-media-obsessed) era, so don’t expect many walkouts, although there will be plenty of head-turning and face-covering. There also will be a critical reevaluation of the film’s central concept, a misogynistic male fantasy that evolves into torture/revenge porn.
Yoshikawa Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura) and Aoyama Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) get more than they bargained for in Audition
Written by Daisuke Tengan based on the novel by Ryu Murakami, Audition begins like a Japanese family melodrama. The gentle-hearted Aoyama Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) watches his wife, Ryoko (Miyuki Matsuda), die in a hospital, leaving him to raise their young son, Shigehiko. Seven years later, the teenage Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) thinks it’s time for his father to find a new wife, as does Aoyama’s best friend, filmmaker Yoshikawa Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura). Yoshikawa and Aoyama decide to hold fake auditions so the lonely widower can find just the right new romantic partner. He is immediately drawn to the younger, damaged Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina in her stunning film debut), a suicidal former ballerina with a sketchy past filled with questions that worry Yoshikawa. But Aoyama starts dating her anyway, and what starts out sweetly ends up something entirely different as he meets a onetime music executive (Ren Osugi) and an old dance teacher (Renji Ishibashi) who — well, you’ll just have to see that for yourself. The last half hour is so brutal, so grotesque, so disturbing, so violent that you should hang on only at your own risk as it travels “deeper, deeper, deeper” into the psyche, among other things.
There’s something not quite right with Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) in Takashi Miike’s Audition
Intimately photographed by Hideo Yamamoto and featuring an ominous score by Kōji Endō, Audition has lost none of its power to thrill and chill, right down to the bone. The film has always raised issues of misogyny and male guilt, but, viewed in 2019, those elements come to the fore. The scene in which Yoshikawa and Aoyama interview numerous women contains more than a few cringeworthy stereotypes, and the flashbacks of the abuse suffered by Asami as a child feel more manipulative in 2019. Essentially, Audition is a film that could spring only from a male brain. That said, it is still terrifying twenty years later. Miike (Ichii the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris), who has directed nearly a hundred films in his three-decade career, from Westerns and yakuza movies to children’s fare and superhero flicks, is best known for the graphic violence in his films, but he also has a wild sense of humor and a knack for making audiences think, “Oh no he won’t,” and then he does. And it’s Audition that cemented that well-earned reputation.
Japanese director Takashi Miike’s first foray into the samurai epic is a nearly flawless film, perhaps his most accomplished work. Evoking such classics as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mizoguchi’s 47 Ronin, Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, and Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, 13 Assassins is a thrilling tale of honor and revenge, inspired by a true story. In mid-nineteenth-century feudal Japan, during a time of peace just prior to the Meiji Restoration, Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki), the son of the former shogun and half-brother to the current one, is abusing his power, raping and killing at will, even using his servants and their families as target practice with a bow and arrow. Because of his connections, he is officially untouchable, but Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira) secretly hires Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho) to gather a small team and put an end to Naritsugu’s brutal tyranny. But the lord’s protector, Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), a former nemesis of Shinzaemon’s, has vowed to defend his master to the death, even though he despises Naritsugu’s actions. As the thirteen samurai make a plan to get to Naritsugu, they are eager to finally break out their long-unused swords and do what they were born to do.