One can certainly wonder why the prolific Takashi Miike is hooked on directing such nutty films. First, lactic effusion, a recurring theme in his cinema (Visitor Q), seems to obsess him, even though that doesn't explain everything!
Be the judge: a yakuza, at his life's end, starts to exterminate chihuahuas, convinced that the poor animals have fomented the destruction of his fellow human beings. His paranoiac crises multiply, he becomes a threat for his Organization. His boss orders his execution and charges his most faithful friend to take care of the dirty job.
Thus begins a strange voyage outside of the city. Freud himself would have given up deciphering Gozu, a narrative crossbreed of a badly regulated Oedipal complex, self-contained homosexuality, dislike for women and particularly for parturition. The most notable scene of the film is when the yakuza, who is mysteriously changed into a superb woman, gives birth to himself, before his horrified friend who has just lost his virginity to the creature! Lars Von Trier has met his match: this horrific climax by far exceeds the traumatizing childbirth of The Kingdom.
This would probably make the most sensitive of us faint, if the laughter, contagious, wasn't taking over all these horrors. Miike subtitled his picture "yakuzas horror movie" and admittedly he doesn't deceive!
While it can certainly be categorized as a cult cinema, Gozu does not, however, look like an arty do-it-yourself work. Visually elaborate, the film brings us to the furthermost bounds of the fantastic and horror. Out of the city, the ghosts invest the fiction and impulses break out until paroxysm. Thus, the homoerotic relation linking the two protagonists generates a beautiful killer with a thirst for revenge. The death of the lustful Godfather, a specialist in the diversion of kitchen accessories for shameful purposes, is another great moment of the picture.
How to react vis-à-vis such delirious fiction? To agree to let oneself be grabbed by the uninterrupted flood of embarrassing scenes? To appreciate the sulfurous and schoolkid-like character of the work? Finally, to question oneself about what Gozu really is ? A splendid story of trashy love, a UFO out of the sick imagination of a resolutely cult filmmaker. And undoubtedly, one of the weirdest films this decade!
plume-noire.com
In 1996, Takashi Miike made a film for the Japanese video market that its distributor had the good sense of releasing theatrically instead. It's a good thing they did, because the film went on to become the director's first work screened at an overseas festival. The film was Fudoh: The New Generation, the festival Toronto and the result a place in Time Magazine's top ten films of the year, a US video release and the world's introduction to a very unique filmmaker.
Seven years later, and Miike has directed another straight-to-video film. And again it shows up at a foreign festival. This time though, there is no theatrical release to thank for its selection. In fact, there was no release whatsoever. Scheduled to hit Japanese video shelves in July 2003, Gozu found itself in the Director's Fortnight section of no lesser event than the Cannes Film Festival in May. If anyone still had doubts about the merits of V-cinema, they can safely abandon them now.
Written by Ichi the Killer's Sakichi Sato, Gozu is less a transgressive bloodbath than an utterly bizarre excursion into almost Lynchian realms of post-logic. It's a film that will no doubt go down well with fans of Higuchinsky's Uzumaki, with its weird phenomena, thoroughly unpredictable storyline and detachment from genre.
Pitting a virginal yakuza trainee against deranged suburbanites, a cow-headed demon and his own id, this is the film Hideaki Sunaga's Getting Wild With Our Monkey hoped to be.
[...]
More than a parade of distorted and outlandish characters, Gozu's descent into the grotesque is above all the manifestation of the protagonist's confusion. The deeper Minami wades into the quagmire of weirdness, the more we as viewers get to know about his personality, in particular his sexual insecurity and his devotion to Ozaki. It's a mix of these two elements that is at the heart of the proceedings, which more than once seem suspiciously Freudian; the actual descent is into Minami's own subconscious.
Peculiarities aside, Gozu is a good example of Miike's fierce loyalty to his actors. The film is a veritable who's who of Miike movie alumni, starting with lead actor Hideki Sone, who first worked with the director in 1996, heading the cast of the ersatz ninkyo eiga Jingi Naki Yabo and its sequel. More recently he appeared in supporting roles in Agitator, Graveyard of Honour and Deadly Outlaw: Rekka. Sho Aikawa of course needs little
introduction after his turns in the Dead or Alive series (as well as Rainy Dog, Ley Lines and Shangri-La).
Tetsuro Tanba, playing the owner of the yakuza disposal business, has also become a Miike regular since playing the crow-hunting grandpa in The Happiness of the Katakuris, while diminutive film critic Tokitoshi Shiota (here unrecognisable as the titular cow-headed demon) has been a longtime Miike supporter and collaborator, best known for playing the singing suicide case in the aforementioned madcap musical. Other regulars show up in bit parts, meaning Miike fans will have a delightful time spotting familiar faces.
There is little precedent for the far out, and at times riotously funny, Gozu in Miike's previous work. This shows that while the director continues to crank out films at an alarming rate (and unbelievably it's an ever-increasing rate: a record number of nine Miike films were released in 2002), there is still no end to his creativity and inspiration in sight. Whatever your impression of this director might be, Gozu is guaranteed to change it completely.
midnighteye.com
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