{"id":2698,"date":"2012-05-03T13:58:52","date_gmt":"2012-05-03T19:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=2698"},"modified":"2012-05-03T13:58:52","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T19:58:52","slug":"2698","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=2698","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

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There\u2019s probably no good way to ease into the films of Takashi Miike, at least in the days before the prolific genre maestro started varying his extreme cinema provocations with offbeat experiments like the splatter-musical The Happiness Of The Katakuris or Sukiyaki Western Django. But I\u2019ll never forget the odd sensation of seeing my first Miike, Ichi The Killer, at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, where promotional barf bags were handed out in a cheeky effort to calibrate expectations. Though I rarely walk out on movies, the scheduling conflicts at film festivals make it easy to bail on one screening to make another, and the first 15 minutes of Ichi The Killer tested my flight-or-fight instinct like no other movie I can recall. It was purely a visceral response: How much more of this mayhem could I physically handle without, well, reaching for the barf bag? <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s set the scene:<\/p>\n

One of the very first scenes has a pimp viciously pummeling a prostitute in the face and raping her while outside, on the balcony, a man in a black latex bodysuit masturbates. Out of an animated puddle of semen emerges the title: Ichi The Killer. But that\u2019s just an amuse-bouche for the main course, an extended torture sequence that\u2014at the time, anyway, before the debased likes of A Serbian Film and Martyrs\u2014presses at the boundaries of representation. Acting on a rumor over who was responsible for his boss\u2019 disappearance, Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), a notoriously sadistic yakuza enforcer, gets his hands on Suzuki (Susumu Terajima), a gang leader thought to be bitter over a dispute in the pornography business. Wanting answers\u2014and also wanting, just as fervently, the opportunity to dish out creative forms of abuse\u2014Kakihara suspends Suzuki\u2019s body from ceiling with giant hooks embedded into his shoulders, back, and legs, which hold him in a position not unlike Tom Cruise during the Langley break-in in Mission: Impossible. When that doesn\u2019t get him the information he wants, Kakihara whips out a thin metal skewer and threads it through his left cheek and tongue. And failing that, he picks up a burbling pan of oil and douses Suzuki\u2019s back and head until the skin starts peeling off. The shrimp tempura will have to wait. <\/p>\n

There are two possible reactions to this sequence the way Miike stages it. The first, obviously, is revulsion. There\u2019s only a tiny subset of people who would even consider subjecting themselves to images that extreme\u2014and within that, only the stout-hearted (or thoroughly desensitized) will emerge unshaken. The second, believe it or not, is laughter, and it\u2019s this reaction that most surprised me when I was watching the sequence unfold\u2014and it\u2019s what ultimately kept me in my seat. Time and again, Miike passes a threshold in Ichi The Killer where the grotesque becomes comical, and the extreme becomes cartoony and ridiculous, a joke unto itself. Based on Hideo Yamamoto\u2019s manga, Koroshiya 1, the film is an experiment in bringing manga-style violence and sexuality to live-action without much modification. And when human skin is made to stretch like Mr. Fantastic, the elasticity of the medium itself is tested. <\/p>\n

Asano\u2019s Kakihara stands as one of the great modern villains, a sadomasochist who\u2019s concerned less with the business of being a yakuza than the pleasure of dishing out (and receiving) the bloody retribution that comes with the job. When his mentor Anjo goes missing, along with over 3 million yen, Kakihara reacts with a strange ambivalence: He\u2019s sad that Anjo, the only man who truly understood how best to torture him, is gone, but he clearly relishes the opportunity to interrogate potential suspects. And if they happen to be innocent, all the better: That only means more rivals he can merrily escort to the brink of death and beyond. It doesn\u2019t seem to occur to him that kicking the hornet\u2019s nest might be an existential threat to his own clan\u2019s business, because his business is violence. With his shock of blond hair and the Joker-like smile created by permanent slits extending from the corners of his mouth, Kakihara gets the unforgettable introduction he deserves: <\/p>\n

As in his three increasingly outrageous Dead Or Alive films, which sandwich Ichi The Killer, Miike focuses on a showdown of opposing but equally titanic forces. The Ichi of the title, played by Nao Ohmori, has none of Kakihara\u2019s zeal for ultra-violence, but if anything, is capable of doing more horrific destruction. Emotionally damaged and highly suggestible\u2014he tends to sob meekly before his switchblade boots rise in a roundhouse kick to the jugular\u2014Ichi acts as a kind of Manchurian candidate for yakuza boss Jijii (Shinya Tsukamoto), who uses implanted memories to rouse him into action. When Ichi attacks, the mess of body parts and innards is so absurdly grotesque that his clean-up crew has as much blood to Swiffer off the ceiling as the floor. He\u2019s the innocent and passive counterpart to Kakihara\u2019s licentious mischief-maker, a killer less by nature than nurture. <\/p>\n

Along with the byzantine plotting\u2014another carry-over from manga, perhaps\u2014Miike includes the flashbacks, fake memories, and explanations that account for what drives these men to such extremes. He did the same thing more effectively in his 1999 film Audition, which carries a measure of sympathy\u2014or at least understanding\u2014of a lonely young woman whose torture of a middle-aged widower with needle and piano wire comes rooted in her own abuse. Generally, these accountings are unnecessary and reductively pop-psychological; we don\u2019t need anyone at the end of Psycho to explain Norman Bates\u2019 behavior when Anthony Perkins\u2019 performance and the revelation about his mother do the job. But Miike approaches these issue from a fresh angle: In Audition, the victim\u2019s deception in holding a fake \u201caudition\u201d in order to find a love connection makes him partly responsible for the blowback that follows. Here, Kakihara and Ichi are prisoners to surrogate fathers that treat them (or have treated them, in the former case) like pitbulls trained to attack. The big difference, beyond their temperaments, is that with the loss of his mentor, Kakihara is a dog off the chain. <\/p>\n

Movies like Ichi The Killer cemented Miike\u2019s reputation for creative torture well before the likes of Saw and Hostel came along, but it\u2019s his sense of humor that sells these scenes as much as the imaginative torments visited upon the human body. The running joke of Ichi The Killer is that Kakihara and Ichi are so vicious in their methods that even hardcore yakuza thugs turn their heads in disgust. While Kakihara manages to hold Anjo\u2019s clan together under his leadership\u2014partly out of fear, and likely also because it\u2019s better to have him as friend than adversary\u2014his henchmen are inclined to wait outside when things get really ugly. Sometimes they don\u2019t get the chance, like when he decides, in an impromptu gesture of repentance, to restore his honor by severing his own tongue on the spot (and carrying out a bloody, mush-mouthed cell phone conversation afterwards). Miike\u2019s mix of the gruesome and the outrageously funny reaches its peak when Kakihara\u2019s extra-wide maw gets employed in a way that\u2019s fine for a Warner Bros. cartoon, but utterly disgusting in live action: <\/p>\n

In retrospect, my initial response to Ichi The Killer seems correct: The film operates like its own S&M session, finding that threshold where pain becomes pleasure\u2014and the seemingly gratuitous becomes art. Miike is not just pushing the limits but extending them, and with his best films, like Ichi The Killer, he seems keenly attuned to what his audience can take and what more he can press them to accept. \u201cThere\u2019s no love in your violence,\u201d Kakihara gently informs a hapless assailant before grinding his clenched fist like a cheese grater. Miike does his violence with conviction.