A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Starting in the late 1950s the horror genre exploded into a bold new world of color. Japan's answer to Fisher, Bava and Corman was Nobuo Nakagawa, who brought an oft-filmed 1825 kabuki play to livid life at the end of the decade. It's a simple story of greed and its supernatural comeuppance that wouldn't be entirely out of place in an American EC comic of the time. An ambitious ronin, Iemon (Shigeru Amachi) wants to marry Oiwa (Katsuko Wakasugi) won't take no for an answer when her dad. apparently a good judge of character, turns him down. Encouraged by his mephistophelean minion Naosuke (Shuntaro Emi), Iemon kills the old man, and a few others, covering his trail so Oiwa is none the wiser. Married life proves less comfortable than Iemon hoped for, as he's quickly reduced to walking the streets as the Japanese equivalent of those guys who wore sandwich boards in old American movies, advertising that wonder remedy, "Dutch medicine." When an opportunity arises to marry into more wealth, Iemon decides that it's time to move on and leave no loose ends behind. Resourceful Naosuke provides him with some European poison to mix into Oiwa's face cream to ensure a painful, disfiguring demise, but Iemon's taking no chances. He recruits the hapless Takuetsu (Jun Otomo) to seduce Oiwa so the aggrieved hubby can rush in, in a cruel variant on the old badger game, and exercise his conjugal prerogative by killing his adulterous wife. Takuetsu quickly loses his enthusiasm for the project when Oiwa applies the face cream and is, as planned, painfully disfigured. Deranged by pain, she tries to kill Takuetsu but ends up impaling herself on a knife. Not to worry: Iemon promptly arrives to make sure Takuetsu doesn't tell the truth. We learn that Iemon's prerogative extends to nailing the "adulterers" to shingles and cutting them in half, but he's content to dump their bodies in a swamp.
The problem for quickly-remarried Iemon is that Oiwa died cursing him, and in Tokugawa Japan you can't write that stuff off as mere delirium. She and Takuetsu have a bad habit of turning up on intimate occasions, while Iemon has the worse habit of trying to kill ghosts with a sword. Worse still, his aim is pretty accurate, but there usually are living people -- temporarily living people, that is -- standing where he sees the ghosts. In short, Iemon goes Sword of Doom on his new family. Meanwhile, his old family isn't done with him. Oiwa's brother, whom he and Naosuke had thrown down a waterfall earlier in the picture, reappears as a living, angry avenger. He teams up with both a live sister and, indirectly, a dead sister to mete out samurai justice to the villain. In many respects Yotsuya is basically a samurai film or the cynical, debunking variety with supernatural trappings, but some of the spooky stuff is quite effective, particularly the surprise reveal of Oiwa's ghost crawling on Iemon's ceiling. The best scene from the horror standpoint is Iemon's out-of-control rampage, which has you fearing helplessly for innocent people once you realize that whenever he starts waving his sword at a ghost, somebody real is going to die. Tadashi Nishimoto's cinematography strikes a stylish balance between natural locations and expressionistic set lighting, but overall Nakagawa's work in color here is a dry run for his real calling-card effort in Jigoku the following year.Yotsuya is still a nicely done film in its own right that did much, in retrospect, to put Japan on the global horror film map.
Not to be confused with the Hollywood ghost story adapted from Henry James, Mauricio Brunetti's film puts a supernatural spin on the slavesploitation subgenre and is ultimately more effective as a horror film than a slavery expose. Argentina managed to abolish slavery without civil war in the 1850s, but Los Inocentes, like a miniature echo of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, shows a generation paying in blood for the blood drawn by the lash.
The screenplay by Brunetti, Natacha Caravia and Andres Gelos is flashbacky in a manner appropriate for a film haunted by curses. The main story, set in 1871, sees Rodrigo (Ludovico Di Santo) return to his father's plantation with his pregnant bride Bianca. The plantation is pure South American gothic, with Rodrigo's mother Mercedes, after whom the place is named, a madwoman whose moaning is muted only in the Madonna's presence, while the old man (Lito Cruz) is a brutal boor dripping with contempt for his son. Some of the old slaves have stayed on as servants, despite the plantation's horrific history. The flashbacks show how Rodrigo's childhood slave playmate was hanged for daring to play on a swing, and how a slave woman was burned at the stake for the double offense of getting raped by the planter and burying a statue of the Blessed Virgin in a superstitious attempt to end the drought that the planter blames on persistent slave paganism. These dead haunt the present but seem to target Rodrigo and Bianca more than the old man.
Los Inocentes isn't EC Comics-style American horror in which the dead avenge themselves on the truly guilty. It's more effective as a horror movie for having its curse reach out indiscriminately at the plantation family. The suffering of innocents is precisely what should be horrible about a curse, but to the extent that Americans expect the guilty to suffer, or assume that those who suffer are guilty of something -- like all those teenagers Jason Voorhees supposedly punished for premarital sex -- those who watch the Argentine film on Netflix may be taken effectively and shockingly by surprise by the direction it takes toward the end.
The picture benefits from Hugo Colace's moody cinematography and a cast whose costumes and performances fit the period nicely. Lito Cruz's vicious patriarch is especially impressive, a secular horror of privileged vice in his own right. You feel he's done a good job destroying his family before the ghosts even get started, and his lustful attention to Bianca is nearly as scary as whatever the ghosts have in store for her. There's something inscrutably blank about his expression when we last see him, facing the ultimate fulfillment of the curse, that makes you wonder whether he understands what's happened and why. We know and wonder why he, of all people, is left standing, but it should be clear to viewers that he hasn't exactly gone unpunished.
As a rule I'm not into ghost stories, but word of mouth on James Wan's "fact"-based period piece had been good and a friend wanted to see it, so I borrowed the disc from the library. To show you how out of touch I am with sizable chunks of modern pop cinema, The Conjuring is the first James Wan film I've seen. I've never seen Saw and have nothing to say about the "torture porn" subgenre it spawned. I missed Insidious and its sequel. That allowed me to approach Conjuring on its own terms. The film's loosely based on an actual investigation by pioneer paranormal researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren, the latter of whom, now in her eighties, makes a brief cameo appearance after serving as a technical advisor to the production. While I identified Conjuring as a period piece a few sentences ago, I found it refreshing that it was not self-consciously a "70s" movie. Its object is not to display the outrageous fashions or play the outrageous music of the decade; the only real "ha ha, the Seventies" moment has the beleaguered Perron family watching The Brady Bunch, presumably in first run, on their television. Something that Conjuring self-consciously is not is a "found footage" horror movie in the currently popular style. Wan makes clear that such an approach was an option, showing us brief found-footage moments from previous Warren investigations only to set them aside. Given the proficiency he shows with the camera in this picture, why limit himself? The only advantage found-footage has is its illusion of immediacy and spontaneity, punctuated by so many "oh my gods" and "holy shits." As befits a period piece, Wan was interested in more old-fashioned chills. I don't scare easily at the movies but I was impressed by the director's craftsmanship as he slowly established an atmosphere of dread and menace in the Perrons' haunted house. Little did they know that a lineage of death dating back to a witch's curse (do Wiccans object to such portrayals these days?) has left them vulnerable to attacks, visitations, bad smells and finally the possession of the mother (Lily Taylor) by the witch's evil spirit. The film makes the most of the physicality of the house; we always have a sense of exactly where we are, at least until another piece of floor gives way and someone falls into an unfamiliar part of the basement. Conjuring deserves more credit for art direction than it will get, while Wan deserves credit for suggestive restraint despite the expected effects displays toward the end. I liked how he constantly teased how someone could go over the railings on the second floor, yet never puts anyone in that predicament. There's a modesty to the production that makes a greater impression than CGI spectacle, making Wan's film part of a positive trend in this year's cinema. This is no acting showcase (except arguably for Taylor) and there's nothing profound to it, but it was watchable both as a story and as a movie, which is more than can be said for many modern horror films. Still, it left me wondering. Are movies dealing with demons and exorcisms part of a distinctly Catholic mythos? The film emphasizes how Ed Warren, though a layman, is recognized as a serious demonologist by the Vatican, as if Rome's opinion alone counted, and it shows yet again how demons are uniquely responsive to or fearful of Latin words. Is a Protestant SOL in such cases, or do demons not bother with such heretics? Just wondering, and only in fun. The Conjuring is fun in its own way, and that alone may make it one of the better horror movies in a while.
How many movies are available for free online? By now it's probably impossible to get an accurate count as new stuff appears constantly. Every so often I get curious, so I do a Google Video Search for stuff 20 minutes or longer. Sometimes I'll check by year, sometimes by genre, sometimes by an artist's name, and so on. The other day I did a "1968" search just for the heck of it and got a lot of results. There's quite a bit of eastern European stuff to be seen, with English subtitles, as well as some Bollywood, Shaw Bros., etc. We must be close enough to Halloween now that I was interested in seeing a horror film, and Google pointed me toward Carlos Enrique Taboada's film, which one "EddietheArsehead" has uploaded to YouTube with enhanced fan-generated subtitles. Eddie bills Hasta el viento tiene miedo as "perhaps the best traditional ghost story ever filmed." That was a gauntlet thrown to the floor. I don't claim to be a specialist of even a particular fan of ghost movies, but that big a claim for a movie I'd never heard of, or didn't remember reading about, basically dared me to watch the film. I wouldn't call it the best of anything, but it does have its virtues and its attractions.
Even the Wind is set at a girl's school where you can tell the students apart by their hair and their basic character traits. Our led student is Claudia (Alicia Bonet, who plays the character's mother in a 2007 remake), who opens the film with a nightmare in which she discovers a hanging woman, the dead one's feet hanging just above eye level. Claudia becomes convinced that, in her dream, she had been inside a locked tower on the campus -- which she and her cronies (and the class tattletale Josefina) now find unlocked. The girls explore up the stairs but are discovered by their headmistress Miss Bernarda, aka "La Bruja." For trespassing, Claudia and her friends are forced to remain on campus over the holiday break.
Stuck together with La Bruja and her more sensitive subordinate, Miss Lucia, the girls get on each other's nerves. One of the girls breaks into the tower to recover a confiscated snapshot of her boyfriend (Another opines, "I wouldn't go in there for a photo of Tony Curtis!") and finds a picture of a past student -- whom Claudia recognizes as the girl she's seen in her dreams. The girl in the picture is Andrea Ferran, who hung herself when La Bruja confined her to campus over the holidays and her mother died in the meantime. Tensions among the girls stretch near to snapping, and Josefina bears the brunt of it, getting forced to dance with the exhibitionist Kitty and then stripped to her scanties. Kitty gets out of control as girls in Mexican horror films will do, and embarks upon a striptease, which the other girls watch with mounting horror, as if Kitty herself were a ghost. But it's not that bad, until Kitty herself sees a ghost -- Andrea, through the window -- and the others see it, too.
I don't know about the wind, but she looks scared.
Determined to get to the bottom, or top, of the haunting, Claudia returns to the tower, and in a shocking development falls to her death after seeing the hanging Andrea while awake. It's a bold, Psycho-like move by the director to eliminate the main character of the story just past the halfway point -- except that Claudia gets better, hours later, after she's been put on a slab under a sheet. It's a miracle, but Claudia has come back changed. She's smarter, showing off extensive and surprising knowledge of the Romantic movement in European literature. She suddenly has enhanced abilities on the piano, when she'd been an indifferent musician before. Of course, Lucia had already told us that Andrea Ferran was smart as a whip, with an excellent memory, and a brilliant pianist. So you see what's going on here -- partly. As someone says, "You never know what the dead want," but Taboada has given us enough information to enable an educated guess. But if we're dealing with Andrea, not Claudia, what'll happen to Claudia when Andrea will get what she wants -- revenge, that is?
There's an irrepressible tackiness to Mexican horror in color from the Sixties, and that makes Even the Wind too garish to be gothic much of the time. But Taboada does work up some authentic chills, especially when he gets the girls out of their over-bright, over-colorful dorms and into the night, often in their nightgowns. Then it's gothic all the way, with gusto. The ending is a bit flat, simply because the circumstances of Andrea Ferran's death aren't really the stuff to inspire epic vengeance. It's not as if the headmistress, Bruja or not, actually killed Andrea's mother or Andrea herself. But I suppose we had better not question ghosts when they're in a temper. But if the film suffers from ghostly pettiness, it gets by with a naively exploitative charm. The students are fun to watch and Kitty's striptease of terror is definitely a camp highlight. Watch the film in the right frame of mind and you may not think as much of it as EddietheArsehead does, but you may want to thank him for making ninety minutes of innocent spooky fun available online. Check it out and judge for yourselves.
What's the big obstacle to Apichatpong Weerasethakul becoming a household name for the global arthouse crowd? I've just said it. Has any contender for cine-canonization had such a jawbreaking moniker? I question whether even Thais have an easy time with it. Look at what another Thai did for comparison's sake. Panom Yeerum is more modestly named for starters. He might even have gotten by abroad with that tag, but as Tony Jaa he's instantly recognizable by martial-arts buffs around the world. But I suppose an auteur representing the high end of the Thai film industry shouldn't be expected to make such compromises. And in any event Weerasethakul has his shot now after his latest film, Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat, won the Palm d'Or at last year's Cannes film festival. He'd had a kind of cult following already, with some people regarding his Syndromes and a Century as one of the best films of the last decade. I'd given that film a shot, but I regret to admit that I quit a little past the halfway point, once it seemed determined to go nowhere. By now I think I'm a little less impatient for every film to "go" someplace, and the Golden Palm entitled Weerasethakul to another chance from me.
Tim Burton chaired last year's Cannes jury, and the supernatural content of Uncle Boonmee may have influenced his choice, though Weerasethakul's approach to such material isn't entirely like Burton's. In the Thai film, Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is a widowed farmer dying of kidney failure, tended by an assistant who may be, like many of Boonmee's workers, an illegal immigrant from Laos. As an opening title explains, while contemplating his imminent death, Boonmee does, in fact, recall some past lives. A pre-credits sequence illustrates the power of suggestion. We see a water buffalo wandering the landscape after escaping from a noose and likely slaughter. Because we've been prompted to assume that this is Boonmee in a past life, we're more attentive to the beast's adventure, if it can be called that, than we would be otherwise.
Boonmee doesn't actually do much past-life recalling afterward as Weerasethakul focuses on a present-day visit by the farmer's sister-in-law Jen and her son Thong. There's a lot of realistically banal small talk as the visitors unpack and Boonmee gets his kindey drained. The director's approach is neorealistic, favoring long takes to create the illusion of immersion in authentic life. The family regathers at the dinner table and chatters away while a woman slowly materializes beside them.
The woman is Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), Boonmee's late wife. She isn't Boonmee's delusion; his relatives react to her appearance and join him in striking up a fresh conversation with the new visitor, none of them alarmed by the presence of a ghost among them. They're hardly more fazed when a noise from downstairs is followed by the appearance of a pair of glowing red eyes in the dark stairwell. A wookie-looking fellow appears and announces himself as Boonsong (Jeerasak Kulhong), Boonmee's long-lost son who disappeared in the forest years ago. He brings his father up to date, explaining that he turned into a monkey man after falling in love with a monkey woman. Mother and son were both drawn home, presumably, by Dad's own impending demise. Like a good host, Boonmee breaks out the photo album to get his guests up to date on life on the farm.
This is probably the make-or-break scene for most viewers. I was intrigued (as I suspect Burton was) by the utterly matter-of-fact way in which Boonmee receives his spectral guests, but I felt that I didn't have enough information about Thai culture to guess the point of the apparently purposeful banality of the scene. Wikipedia informs me that Boonmee is part of an ongoing project in which Weerasethakul will chronicle in depth the northeastern Isan region of Thailand, but what, if anything, does the characters' reaction to the ghosts and monsters tell us about Isan? Would the people there really react that way if they saw ghosts? Do they claim to have seen ghosts, and to have reacted that way? Don't know, don't know and don't know.
Fortunately, enough's going on in Boonmee to invite alternate readings of the ghost scenes. For instance, I inferred a parallel between the character's bland welcome to the supernatural and Boonmee's blithe indifference to the legal status of a different class of strangers, the illegal immigrants who work for him. Later in the movie, Weerasethakul seems to invite a comparison of the spirit world from which Huay and Boonsong come with the spirit world of television that captivates Jen in a hotel room. Jen herself becomes a kind of spirit in a late scene when she splits in two, one Jen going out with an AWOL monk, the other staying in the hotel room to watch TV. Something is probably being said here about our divided consciousness and the different planes of existence we inhabit simultaneously, but that's just a guess I'm making.
Weerasethakul has said that Boonmee is a film purposefully made in a medley of cinematic styles. That explains some of the gratuitous elements in it, including the movie's most artistically ambitious sequence, a mythological episode in which a princess makes love with a catfish in the middle of a stream. Is Boonmee the princess or the fish? Search me, but the sequence is brilliantly done, revealing that the relatively primitive approach of other episodes is a conscious directorial choice. More gratuitous still is an anecdote told by Boonsong of his capture by a mysterious band of soldiers. Related entirely through stills, it's an obvious homage to Chris Marker's La Jetee, but to what purpose?
Uncle Boonmee is like a portfolio of Weerasethakul's virtuosity submitted for global acceptance. There's a showiness to some of it at the cost of a greater rigor that I recognized, though I didn't exactly appreciate it, in Syndromes and a Century. The director's strategy dooms Boonmee to be less than the sum of its parts, but the sum is actually pretty impressive on its own. You do get the sense that you've been let into an alien culture, even if you don't comprehend it fully, and Weerasethakul's default long-take, immobile-camera approach works to achieve verisimilitude amid the phantasmagoria. If you can enjoy a movie, like I can, as an opportunity for virtual tourism, you'll probably dig a lot of Boonmee, and it may give you some food for thought as well. It's not a great film in my opinion, but an interesting film will often do just fine.
Thanks to Cannes, Uncle Boonmee may be playing in a big city near you. Here's a trailer for it uploaded to YouTube, appropriately enough, by trailers.
The title itself is a kind of euphemism, compared to how earlier generations might have titled such a story. Consider The Haunting of Katie, Terror on Video, Demonic Possession or other possibilities. The paradox of "paranormal" is that it seems intended to normalize the phenomena portrayed in Oran Peli's venture into the "found footage" genre. In that sense, "Paranormal Activity" is an ironic and thematically appropriate title, just as "found footage" is the appropriate approach to the story Peli tells. The footage is the male protagonist Micah's attempt to quantify and thus manage the increasingly severe noises and movements in the home he shares with his girlfriend Katie. Micah (pronounced "Meeka") is a DIY ghost hunter. He's got the video equipment and the gear to record and isolate peculiar sounds. Dumb as he is in horror-movie terms, he represents modern-day empirical rationalism. He's a man of the age of the "Ghost Hunters" TV show and all its rivals, imitators and rip-offs, but his half-assed pursuit of knowledge is a flight from knowledge at the same time. He can't deny that strange stuff is happening in his house, but he stubbornly refuses to recognize it for what it is. He can acknowledge weird shit and finally want to flee from it, but he seems incapable of acknowledging evil or prior knowledge of evil. He reluctantly welcomes a psychic but refuses to consult a demonologist and ignores Katie's warnings not to mess with ... whatever it is ... by trying to film it or contact it with a borrowed Ouija board. Is Peli trying to say something about all the real-life ghost hunters? I doubt it, unless he believes in demons himself. It's more likely that a natural story idea occurred to him and he had the minimal means to put it on film, and the rest is pop-culture history.
Paranormal Activity worked for me on an intellectual level instead of a visceral one. Despite the gimmick, it's really a classic horror story of a certain kind in which a fool gets his comeuppance. On that level it was reasonably well thought out. As for the extraordinary claims about how frightening it is, maybe you had to be in the right place at the right time. To get the scare effect you probably have to be in a crowded theater where the screaming crowd serves as a horror multiplier. Peli's technique makes it impossible for him to set up his scare moments with traditional movie gimmickry. The camera just stares out at a couple in bed and there's no music to create a mood. Some people may feel that these self-imposed limitations make the spook scenes more horrific because they may look more real, but some of the biggest scare moments come across as little more than dead air in the privacy of home, It's as if you need other people screaming as the punctuation that proves that something really scary happens.
The gimmick is also abused to pad the film in spots. Several times we have overnight scenes in which something paranormal happens while our couple is sleeping, seen only by the video camera. Then on the next morning we'll see Micah and Katie watch the same footage and react to it. It may be that Peli wants to establish the objective reality of events, while the morning-after scenes are meant mainly to illustrate Katie's growing panic or Micah's obtuseness. But all of that could have been established in the morning-after scenes, since the video images are objective reality whether we see them "live" or on Micah's laptop. The main object seems to have been to get the film safely to releasable feature length.
Now that I've criticized some of the gimmickry let me reiterate that I think the film succeeds thanks to the writing and the acting, the stars being persuasive in a way that artless newcomers often can be. People who judge the film by whether it deserved to be a blockbuster, or those who felt manipulated by the marketing campaign, shouldn't lose sight of the genuine quality in the film's concept. At the same time, it's fair to say that the hype was excessive in portraying Paranormal Activity as more than it is. What it is is a mild satire of modern culture, and the fact that it needed such hype to get our attention probably tells us something more about our culture.
The second Franco-Japanese production by controversial director Nagisa Oshima threatens for most of its running time to become cinema's most ambitious EC comic, but Oshima ends up having a somewhat different agenda. This is the follow-up to his international success with In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida), which landed him in court back home on obscenity charges. Criterion has just released both films, but the Albany Public Library has the later film first, so that's what I'm reviewing.
The setting is a Japanese village in 1895, during the Meiji era. Gisaburo is the local rickshaw driver for hire. Seki, his wife, is middle aged but doesn't look it. Friends call her "little Seki," and she's still attractive enough to earn the attention of Toyoji, a drifter 26 years her junior who lives with Renzo the village idiot and still wears his old military jacket, which makes him quite the modern figure in this traditional environment. He has an itch that Seki must scratch. Wandering into her house while Gisaburo's on the road, he sees her sleeping with her toddler son at her breast. "Hey, little boy, don't hog it all," Toyoji says, "Let your big brother have a sip." Seki's awake after all and rebuffs him after he cops a feel. He drags her into another room and, how shall I say, orally rapes her. She's turned on, except for her boy wailing in the other room. She tries to shut that sound out and concentrate on Toyoji's more intimate oration, and the affair is on.
Things quickly go too far. Toyoji grows jealous of the hapless Gisaburo, and after enticing Seki into letting him shave her privates, he decides that the rickshaw driver has to die. The idea is to get him drunk and then strangle him, but Gisaburo has a Rasputin-like capacity to absorb alcohol. After three trips to the local liquor dealer for refills, he's finally in a killable condition. The lovers then drag the corpse through the snow and dump it into an abandoned well. Seki tells the village that Gisaburo has gone to Tokyo to look for work, while Toyoji collects leaves under the suspicious eye of a local aristocrat to dump into the well.
By the time three years have passed, people are starting to dream about Gisaburo in a weird way. That's pretty much his cue to start appearing as a ghost. That makes Oshima's movie a kwaidan (or kaidan), which is something different from the ghostiness associated with modern "J-horror," and something even more different from American ghost stories. Over here, the mere thought that there might be ghosts inspires dread, and many horror films create suspense by leaving the existence of ghosts in question. In a kwaidan, by comparison, ghosts are pretty much taken for granted. They're just part of the spiritual landscape in traditional communities like Seki's village. Gisaburo's ghost has no vengeful agenda. He hangs around the house and asks for food, or he pulls his ghostly rickshaw along familiar roads, offering Seki a lift on one eerie occasion. He still loves his wife. At one point Seki sets her house on fire and appears determined to die. Toyoji, trapped outside, flees the scene in despair, only to see the ghost himself. He prepares to defend himself with a rock until he realizes that Gisaburo is imploring him to save Seki. At one point, Seki asks the ghost if he realizes that she helped kill him. He gives no clear answer.
So we have a sort of unnatural menage a trois, further complicated when Seki's eldest daughter comes to visit. Toyoji thinks it unwise for him to visit when Seki's entertaining, but she takes his reticence as a sign that his affection is waning. This gets worse when all the ghost sightings draw an obnoxious, clumsy policeman into the village. Again, Toyoji thinks seeing Seki with this guy hanging around would look suspicious, and his absence only heightens Seki's anxieties. But these two can't resist each other. They share something like true love.
At different moments, each resolves to take the full rap for Gisaburo's death, urging the other to plead innocence. And when they talk of the tortures they'll endure to protect each other, that turns them on even more. When Seki imagines the corpse rotting in the well, that turns them on. Their passion gets more masochistic. He puts his hand over her mouth during sex to still her ravings about the corpse, and she bites deeply into it, bringing him to climax -- all while the policeman is eavesdropping under the floorboards. They finally decide to haul the corpse out of the well, thinking that might appease Gisaburo's spirit. They nearly get trapped inside themselves, and seem to see the ghost dumping leaves on them. They escape, but Seki suffers hysterical blindness, which doesn't stop them from one more bout of muck-covered love before the police close in. In an ironic consummation of their passion, they're tortured together, suspended from tree branches and beaten with rattan canes in a brutal denouement that only proves the depth of their loyalty to each other....
There seem to be three empires coexisting in the film: the titular empire of passion, the empire of nature and spirits, and the political empire of Meiji Japan. The twist in the tale is that the state, rather than the ghost, is the instrument of retribution against the killers. Oshima may be suggesting that the natural order, of which the ghost is a part, may be more tolerant of the lovers' violent passion, or at least more capable of reconciliation, than the state can be. The state also seems to be more cruel even than the murderous lovers, and hypocritical to boot. "This is an age of civilization and enlightenment," the policeman says, "If I torture a man I'll lose my job." But torture he does, with gusto, at the end. I might be able to whittle the empires down to two if you'll buy an argument that the empire of passion is part of the empire of nature, that Seki and Toyoji's affair is a kind of natural phenomenon, while the state's violence is the unnatural force and the source of whatever ultimate horror this ghost story offers.
This is the first Oshima film I've seen and it's a beautiful piece of work, full of vibrant landscapes, authentically grungy interiors, and uncanny visions. Oddly, there seemed to be a sharper visual contrast between the gritty environment of the peasants and the immaculate, geometric domain of the doomed young master and his mother than between the peasants' everyday existence and the ghostly interventions. Kudos to Yoshio Miyajima's cinematography and to the folks at Criterion for confecting another luscious bit of DVD eye candy.
Toru Takemitsu composed a nicely evocative score, while the cast, led by Kazuko Yoshiyuki as Seki and Tatsuya Fuji as Toyoji, is uniformly fine -- possibly excepting whoever had the thankless job of playing the village idiot who communicates only by yelling.
In the end, Ai no borei is neither a horror movie nor a sex movie in any strict generic sense, though it definitely comes closer to the latter. It's not nearly as explicit as Realm of the Senses is said to be, though it's still a very sensual experience. It's definitely an adult movie, but I mean that in the "work of art" sense of the term.
Here's an oddly static trailer for the American release of the film.
And here's a French trailer (with Greek subtitles) that gives you a better idea.
A
