Directed by Takashi Miike
Written by Ryu Murakami (novel); Daisuke Tengan (screenplay)
Starring Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Jun Kunimura, Renji Ishibashi, Miyuki Matsuda
Genre: Drama / Horror / Romance / Thriller
Country: Japan
Runtime: 110 minutes
MPAA Rating: Rated R

Evaluation: 9.5/10
by Greg Ferguson







How times have changed. I've just finished watching Robert Bresson's 1945 classic drama Les dames du Bois de Boulogne in which a man is duped by his vindictive ex-girlfriend into marrying an attractive acquaintance of hers with a devastating secret - she's a former showgirl whose great shame is having bedded a few lovers. His dilemma, and his ex's glee, is agonizing over whether or not she's still worthy of his love after her secret is revealed. While I appreciated the acute, relative tragedy of the film's characters, I kept thinking what I'm sure many of you are saying to yourselves now: it could have been worse. Having seen cult Japanese director Takashi Miike's modern thinkpiece shocker Audition, a loose version of these events, I assure you it can. Today we're more open to our partners having previous love lives, yet there remains a raw nerve of insecurity and apprehension each time we meet a new romantic interest. For Miike, exposing this nerve is a source of almost infinite possibility for terror, and he devotes equal glee to cranking up the carnage and pushing the boundaries of our tolerance. With a sure hand and a fiendish vision, Miike pulls us in, locks the door, shuts off the lights, slaps us around, then shoves us back into daylight to wonder what just happened. It is an enthralling, multi-layered masterwork.

Many viewers are likely to feel something akin to intense violation, and it's no wonder. For the first ninety minutes, Audition plays like a straightforward romantic dramedy. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a recently widowed father of one when we first meet him. Seven years pass and he has not remarried or even begun looking, but with the help of his son (Tetsu Sawaki) he realizes how lonely he is. Thankfully, his good friend Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura) is a movie producer and offers to set up a phony casting call for a bogus movie so lovely and comely hopefuls can audition for the role of his new girlfriend. It's a skeevy tactic, but it works; among the many women who respond, Aoyama picks the alluringly quiet and composed Asami (Eihi Shiina). Almost too good to be true, she has him flummoxed and giddy, and soon enough he is calling her about matters outside of their project. As luck would have it, she seems won over by his advances, and it begins to look like the entire affair has worked out smoothly and happily.

Suddenly, at a very unexpected moment deep into the film, Miike brilliantly subverts everything we've just seen by playing up the couple's anxieties about intimacy and toying with our own. At this point the tone shifts about as starkly as if you'd reached the top of a flight of stairs only to be sucker-punched and hurled back to the bottom. When it happens, though, it sort of makes sense to us because we know about Aoyama's dishonesty and, as Yasuhisa discovers, Asami may not be entirely truthful about her past either. Nevertheless, the change is deliberately uncomfortable. For a brief while, Aoyama is thrust into a state of bewilderment where all of his worst worries and fears bubble to the surface and appear to come true until, finally, Miike unleashes hyperbolic torment so gruesome that at its screening at the Cannes Film Festival in France, Audition set a record for the highest number of patron walk-outs.

We already know from the film's poster that Asami is the assailant, and it's crucial to our acceptance of the film that we scrutinize her actions and reflect on her motivations. In a way, Aoyama's response to his brutal torture at the end of the film is his own audition for her, and what Miike gets at with this extreme portrayal of horror is a sort of moral provocation tempered by love. Will we still embrace the ones we love, or even ourselves, if we are able to glimpse the dark secrets that lurk? And, beyond the scope of the characters and story, can we embrace Miike the artist having seen into his sick and deranged imagination? Our answers to these open-ended questions posed by Audition are far more disturbing than the simple issues of promiscuity and fidelity.

(Audition is available on DVD and may be rented from Spit It Video located at 15 Lewis St., Moncton.)