Ôdishon / Audition (1999) – 2/5

All about the wire (and not the television show this time)

„Ôdishon“ is an award-winning Japanese-Korean Japanese-language film from 1999, so this one is pretty close to its 25th anniversary now and I thought that it looked a bit newer than that. Today, perhaps, let’s start with the basics here. The film is five minutes short of the two-hour mark, so it is a rather long, but not super long movie you can say. The director is probably the star here if you look at the gigantic number of films and projects Takashi Miike has worked on over the years. Easily triple-digit territory by now and he is still only slightly over 60, so there may be a lot more to come, especially if we see that he was quite prolific in recent years. I think I have seen more from him, but I cannot really put my finger on it. If it was only „Masters of Horror“ or something else too. His content is definitely not really mainstream awards-show friendly and this film here is a good example of that, but the big amount of recognition he has received nonetheless probably puts him at least in the extended circle of the most impactful Japanese filmmakers from the last 50 years. He is also one of the three writers. Another would be Daisuke Tengan, who has also directed films in the past, but is nowhere near as prolific as Miike. Still, he is even older, so no huge surprise that he is also active in the industry since the early 1990s. And finally, the novel this film is based on stems from Ryû Murakami, who is another decade older than the other two, so over 70 now and it is fairly impressive to see that quite a handful of his written works got turned into film projects over the years. Good for him that his releases garnered enough fame and appreciation for all this to happen. I have not read his book here that the film is based on, so cannot talk about parallels and differences between the two media this time.

The lead actor is Ryo Ishibashi and he is a prolific actor for a long time now. This may be a contender for his most known work, but he kept appearing in a lot more. He was also younger back when this film got made compared to what age I would have guessed him to be. I keep forgetting from how many years ago this is already, so Miike and Tengan were also not old at all. The female lead is Eihi Shiina and she is of course also the woman you see on the poster here together with Ishibashi. Her career has been bumpier than his, especially in the last couple years, but still pretty solid. These are the two leads, but you could also mention Tetsu Sawaki who plays the main character’s son here, even if he is just a supporting character. He has not been in film for decades now, so can be said probably that he won’t be anymore either, but who knows. That shall be it there. If you want to know more about the acting trio’s or writing trio’s bodies of work, go ahead and check them out. Now let’s move on the story. The poster looks really harmless as if a woman and man are having a date at a restaurant, eating dinner, having a fine glass of wine, but this was really pretty much the only normal moment in this movie. The idea how they meet and get to know each other is already a bit on the bizarre side with this casting or the audition that is mentioned in the film’s title and yes, this is one of these Japanese words that sound funny because they are literally the same like the English word, but with their own writing. Maybe it’s just me and my linguist background, but I always enjoy seeing this.

Anyway, said audition already brought in some of the problems I had with this movie for me, like I did not understand the entire motivation behind it all. It was kept a bit in the shadows, in mystery, but apparently still enough young Japanese women got attracted by the search for whatever it was. A romantic partner? A sex mate? An actress for an adult film? An actress for a serious film with nudity and some adult material? Who knows, we will never really find out. We also never see other people supposed to play in the movie if it was for one the way we see it for example in the recent highly successful „Drive my Car“, so I guess the search was really entirely of a private nature. They end up in bed anyway. What happened then towards the end, was surely entirely of a private nature, namely we find out about the real idea behind the female protagonist’s motivations to become part of the male protagonist’s life and let me assure you those were of a really violent nature. It was a huge break in tone compared to all before that where the film did seem at a mystery movie at best, but could even be seen as a bit of a family drama (with the man having lost his wife) with the addition of some slightly comedic material that was for example linked to the man’s son. The sign the father makes to show him that he approves of the son’s new girlfriend was among the funniest the film had to offer. Another funny moment to me was when we see the audition of the fateful girl and the two guys take a brief break afterwards where one mocks the other a bit for how he acted towards that girl and what he said.

That man, not the key character, was more reasonable and unbiased there and did not let immediate attraction get in the way of making a neutral choice. Then again, what is neutral here anyway if we look at what all this was for? Oh wait, I think the girl said on one occasion that she did not get the role in the movie, but the more important role in the man’s personal life, didn’t she? So there was a film actually in the making there okay, unless they tricked her that she would think so, but we do not find out anything about the movie. Just like we do not find out anything about the son’s romance relationship afterwards. You can say that all we know about the characters in here is really what the main characters knows. We find out stuff the same time he finds out with very few exceptions. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the ending or what happens right before the ending, namely when we see how disturbed the young girl is with what she does to the man there. To his eyes and to his legs as well. A really sharp wire helps her just like it has helped her with decapitating another character even. You can only guess what really turned her into this: It may have been the long-time loneliness, it may have been the emotional abuse she was facing when others had great hopes for her in becoming an athlete as a child. It may have been the physical abuse she was facing when things did not go perfect and she got too really big scars from it. The male protagonist is really just an unlucky target, wrong place wrong time, in contrast to the other very old fella she takes care of before that where you felt he kinda deserved it. The one who has been in her life for a long time.

Unfortunately, I felt that this movie never really impressed me as much as I hope it could. The more spectacular inclusions like the dream sequence that is not really a dream sequence because the harmonic moment is the actual dream sequence felt so-so and just for the sake of it. Oh yeah, there was a bit of another funny moment when the main character makes sure his feet are still there and did not get cut off. Miike surely used some dark humor in here or maybe it was already like this in the novel. But not too much either because those were the only somewhat funny moments where I heard the crowd laughing a bit just like I was smiling as well. I still wonder how people must have really limited brain capacity to fall asleep during a movie like this and as I just talked about comedy, I am also laughing a bit about those poor souls who have to live with them and endure the snoring day in and day out. Deeply unlucky and unhappy too. Besides, why would you get tickets for a film when you sleep 50% of the screen time? But that is another story. Overall, this film was tolerable at best before its violent escalation towards the end and this escalation also felt rather for the sake of it and maybe to hide the fact in an exaggerated manner that the film never really gains steam story-wise before this. I still thought that the way the antagonist, if we can call her that, is defeated here with the help of coincidence linked to the son, who admittedly does not do a lot except deliver a pretty fateful kick, was alright. Could have been worse there. Maybe I also would have liked the film more if it had featured a more attractive female lead. I know many viewers, males especially, probably liked her more than I did, but yeah I can’t change it. On the film’s poster that maybe also includes a shot from the trailer, she looks like channeling her inner Elle Driver before the latter even existed. That is all then. I give „Audition“, which towards the end reminded me a bit of the really old „Guinea Pig“ short films, a thumbs-down. Not recommended.