Guest Article: Review: Takashi Miike’s Gozu
Takashi Miike’s Gozu
Submitted by Leila Merosands.
Takashi Miike’s versatility is famous, and seriously amazing, and while there are no, repeat no, easy comparisons for Gozu, it’s so compelling I find myself wondering anyway, about comparisons, to the gorgeous Sukiyaki Western Django, to David Lynch, seeking the magical keystone of it’s power and strange beauty.
Genre reliably runs home and commits suicide when Takashi Miike is around, so it means little that Gozu has possibly the least glamorous portrayal of organized crime ever, and many elements of horror; there’s a quality of the mundane and homely ordinariness, serving as an oddly other-dimensional, seemingly translucent, base for knockout, eerily unexpected, poeticism and wonder. There’s exactly one “normal”, i.e., movie formulaic, element in the film, seen briefly through a window early on, before the movie attacks it.
‘Gozu’ means “cow head”, which does as much to explain the film as you’d guess – well, there’s a cow head in it, attached to a near naked dead guy, and apparently drooling staggering amounts of a milky fluid on its brother, in the room beneath. This is overlaid on the brother’s fear of the rural small-town older woman who’s obsessed with her own ever-flowing breast milk. Yet even she’s too strange to scare us, and fascinates instead. She is, like many of the movie’s characters, a neutral element, as the banal remains appropriately ignorable, while the weirdness of the movie’s wild journey sparkles lushly, the joy of the weird and recognizably true.
The lines between life and death are blurred with fabulous success, as dead people return, even after having their skins neatly pressed, Yakuza tattoos making this a snazzy business. Not as ghosts, or even identifiably different, as the worst cross-dresser in the world, three years dead, serves coffee in the local diner. Also not as the same, or even same number of people, although I’ll try to avoid spoilers.
The small town where Minami, our protagonist, finds himself seems to strongly suggest a Japanese counterpart to “cue the Deliverance theme” horror, yet this veneer is amazingly put to terrific use and made beautiful, exactly by taking its superficiality for what it is, i.e., this is surrealism. The difference of course, is in the strangeness found, and it’s wonderful, with universality that inspires delight instead of horrifying.
There’s sometimes a thematic thing in Asian cinema, where “the crazy person is right” or at least on to what’s really going on, and the example of Ozaki, Minumi’s brother, is a serious contender for the best of these. Minami was ordered to kill Ozaki, and did accidentally, but it doesn’t work, and I’ll stop the spoilers there, especially since they don’t do much to shed light on anything in the film. Both crazy and right, it works awesomely when it works at all.
Takashi Miike’s talent for breathtaking visual beauty is evident, but quietly not on display in Gozu, leaving the human experience and incredible journey to carry the film. And it does, with powerful effect – I can at least say this much, if you liked SWD or Izo, or Lynch, you really, really don’t want to miss this movie.
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