Audition

A quick glance at the list of external reviews linked on the IMDB website for Audition confirms that it’s been relegated to obscurity as a cult horror film. Aside from the New York Times and the Village Voice, most reviews are from genre-specific websites like “Slasherpool Review” and “Sex Gore Mutants.” Genres can be helpful categories, but their dogmatic application can also breed preconceptions that can steer us away from movies that make us think, solely based on what they make us feel.

Such is the case with Audition, an undeniably gory film by director Takashi Miike, who’s become something of the auteur of graphically extreme social commentary in his native Japan, where genres thankfully hold a much looser grip on the public imagination and commercial films are unshackled by a Byzantine ratings system like the one that infests the US. Even so, Miike remains a cult figure whose movies probably generate more academic debate than gross receipts. Any release of his movies in North America would probably require an NC-17 rating, or worse, a hackneyed edit of the scenes deemed most offensive, emasculating it of its message. Which is a pity, because as hard as it is to watch all the way through, Audition is a courageously insightful film that earns every drop of its viscera, and whose underlying political message is — or at least should be — much more disturbing than its over-celebrated bloodletting.

The first half of Audition plays much like the dramas of other Japanese directors, with a ploddingly thoughtful introduction to a broken family. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) loses his wife to an illness in the first scene, with the dying wife on the bed intercut with shots of her young son walking up the corridor bearing a hand-made gift for her. This melodrama is followed by a jump to seven years later, when the son (Tetsu Sawaki) is now a lively teen who tells his father that he looks old and should consider remarriage. Together with his film producer friend Yasuhisa (Jun Kinimura), Aoyama contrives an audition for a fake film project so that he can overview a few dozen young women for dating purposes. From the ensuing parade of young ambitious actresses, Aoyama selects the mysterious Asami (Eihi Shiina), a shy former ballet dancer whose resume essay intrigues Aoyama with descriptions of mourning and loss that mirror his own.

Their courtship is touching, slow, and full of genuine moments, with the two trading bits of information and slowly allowing access to each other’s interior. Aoyama is nevertheless the aggressor, being the older one and the instigator, as well as the male. But his deepening desire for Asami and craving for entry into her life is sincere, which makes the radical gear-shift of the last act of Audition all the more unsettling. Aoyama is our sympathetic protagonist, an aging widower looking for love, and thus not the expected subject of the kind of horrible vengeance Asami finally wreaks upon him. It is this seemingly unjustified twist that reeks of sadism to many, who dismiss Audition as an incredibly gratuitous ruination of what was amounting to a very sweet film about lonely people seeking a second chance. But it’s this twist that is exactly Miike’s point about the true disorder of Japanese society. The problem is not beautiful, seemingly nice girls who turn out to be medically-trained sadists, but the normal sexualization of Japanese women by men who don’t think of themselves as abusive or hateful.

Miike’s trick is to first show us a movie world in which we think we know the rules. Aoyama’s loneliness is not especially selfish, and his occasional guilt over the memory of his deceased wife provides touchstones to his humanity. The audition is a fraud, but Aoyama himself thinks so too. He isn’t trying to exploit the women, just find a compatible one. In parallel, the audience is drawn into the game as well, delighting in the voyeuristic pleasure of watching 30 pretty Japanese girls preen and prance and occasionally strip for us. The other women in Aoyama’s life aren’t victims either — his subordinate who announces her impending marriage, his housekeeper, and the teenage girl who studies biology with his son all pass through Aoyama’s life like unimportant minor characters. He’s only interested in Asami, more so when she disappears on him, leading him to an investigation of her past that begins to reveal a dark side with implications of murder.

The deeper Aoyama gets into his search for Asami, the more his life and mind begin to unravel, concurrent with the unraveling of our own understanding of what kind of movie we are watching. Although Audition drops several early hints that Asami is not what she appears, we are still unprepared for the descent into dream logic that Miike takes us on. Audition liberally mixes and matches sections of dialogue and scenery, placing dream sequences within dream sequences, and jumps back and forth between time, space, and realities. But it’s not a random pastiche — rather, it mirrors the collapse of Aoyama’s sheltered world, and more importantly accumulates into an unexpected indictment of Aoyama’s (and our) entire sexual existence. In one long hallucinatory sequence, he engages in terrifying oral sex with every woman in the movie in turn, unleashing his subconscious guilt into a conscious crime. Aoyama is not a bad person, and neither are we, and in mutating the comfort of our own middlebrow sexual ideas into a list of indictments that warrant torturous punishment, Miike accomplishes something revolutionary, or at least way overdue.

Its insight, as well as the likelihood of its miscomprehension by most audiences, is reminiscent of Remy Belvaux’s 1992 fake-documentary masterpiece Man Bites Dog. Following a charming serial killer with a camera crew, Belvaux casualizes and humorizes his protagonist’s multiple homicides until we forget that it’s murder — something which most mainstream entertainment does as well. Bit by bit the camera crew becomes involved in the killings, as does the audience by extension, climaxing in the drunken butchering and rape of a pregnant women whose fetus is eviscerated. It’s this scene which delivers Belvaux’s hidden message that murder is horror, and we are horrible for having enjoyed any of it. Not coincidentally it’s also this scene that had to be edited out for release in most markets, reducing Man Bites Dog to a mockumentary about a serial killer who eventually gets killed by another serial killer and sparing us the discomfort of facing our own appalling appetite for violence as entertainment.

Audition uses very different but equally disciplined method to deliver a similar message about sex. Asami represents the very essence of mainstream desirability — young, lithe, opaque yet sweet — what Yasuhisa describes as “beautiful, classy, and obedient.” Even when she turns into a nightmare sadist she’s still sexy, a calm philosopher whose face never breaks from its angelic expression even as she executes a piano-wire amputation. Even when we see what she has reduced a former victim to — and believe me, it’s awful — Asami never descends into monstrosity. Miike never lets us off the hook because Asami never stops being what we still desire.