Gozu

Gozu is a movie that bores into your soul: it looks deep within you and drags out the hidden phantasmagoric fantasies that we all harbour. It's also the kind of unsettling nightmare that urban-dwellers imagine provincial towns to be, full of brazenly quaint characters with freakish habits. Yet there are plenty of comedic moments amongst the ocean of surreal. Takashi Miike is the master of successfully juxtaposing the horrifically bizarre with humour, of establishing remarkable tones of heightened shock. Gozu is part of British TV channel FilmFour's 'FrightFest' season, a fortnight of classic and obscure horror films. It's August date is designed to coincide with the annual film festival of the same name, that takes place in Leicester Square and it throws numerous gems that I was previously ignorant to. This be one.

I knew Miike from a couple of his other horror works – 1999's Audition and his ‘Box’ segment in the film collaboration Three… Extremes – and enjoyed them both. He is somehow consistently able to exceed the confining boundary of tastefulness without shedding any of the emotional integrity. The central character in Gozu is Minami (Hideki Sone), a nervous young man ascending the Yakuza ladder. He is in thrall to his mentor Brother Ozaki (Show Aikawa) whose mental capacity has seemingly dissipated in the Tokyo smog; Minami is instructed by Boss to assassinate Ozaki in the town of Nagoya away from the capital. But Ozaki’s corpse manages to escape outside a café in the town and Minami is forced to hole up at a local inn and tracks his movements with the aid of Nose, a local Yakuza with a prominent skin deformity.

Sone plays Minami well: not as a sniveling wretch who finds himself in the Yakuza out of broader social weakness, but as an anxious young man of inexperience thrust into a realm of confusion and misunderstanding. He is virginal and fretful around women, so fretful in fact that his sanity deserts him when confronted by an attractive young woman who presents herself as Ozaki (Kimika Yoshino) in female form – don’t ask, that plot development doesn’t make much sense when you’re watching it, never mind out of context – and he believes her. It's how his mind deals with sexual contact – by substituting the woman for a man he knew very well. And thus one of Gozu's central tenets concerns his 'awakening' to the physical.

It’s difficult to discuss Gozu without mentioning the famous scenes, though they will be spoilers. In my opinion it’s very difficult to properly discuss a film – particularly one as abstract as this – without referring to what happens at the conclusion. In the reviews that I’ve been writing in the past couple of months I have, generally, refrained from giving away the endings. But really, it is kind of necessary. And so I will tell you, dear reader, what happens at the culmination of Gozu. THIS WILL BE A SPOILER. The female Ozaki coaxes Minami into intercourse. During their interaction a hand grabs his penis from within her vagina. She proceeds to gives birth to a full grown man: the male Ozaki. Then they all walk cheerfully down the road together. End. Pretty staggering stuff and one’s mouth is very much agape as the credits roll. That wild surrealism surpasses even the other egregiously stark images: a person with a cow’s head appears to Minami in a dream sequence carrying a message and later he catches the innkeeper and her brother in the midst of their side business of bottled breast milk production. But it would be disingenuous to reduce this sometimes opaque work to nothing more than its most memorable and shocking bits. The cow’s head represents the scariest thing in Japanese folklore (even the retelling of the story supposedly reduces its listeners to a catatonic sludge) and to see it reduced to nothing more than a hallucinatory postman is, if nothing specifically tangible, symbolic of Miike’s iconoclastic tendencies. I must confess I don’t really ‘get’ the meaning of the elderly lady squeezing milk out of her breasts. Renewal? Rebirth? Prolonged youth? There’s no doubt however that she (Keiko Tomita) suffers from loneliness. It’s a theme that is prevalent: Minami is repeatedly propositioned by various characters, all suffering from that crippling symptom of advancing age. For him at least that loneliness – which manifests itself largely through sexual frustration – is resolved at the end. Snapshot glimpses of the lives of the innkeeper and Nose are emblematic of the broader stagnation of their lives: they desperately seek some excitement before the natural path of mortality takes its withering course. This endemic sense of waste is exacerbated by the provincial town they reside in, seemingly characterised by decades of inertia and older methods of progress – Minami is desperate to make haste in the location of Ozaki’s body, but Nose and his Yakuza superior prefer to take their leisurely time.

The final word though must go to the Koji Endo, the guy behind Gozu’s music – it’s superbly executed, both in thematic appropriation and emotional effectiveness. To invoke unease, especially in the scenes of rampant surrealism, he masterfully constructs pieces of jarring atonal noise with strings and synthesisers. His use of cello for when female Ozaki delivers male Ozaki is in the modernist vein of avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis, and works so well. This curious picture is another tile in Miike’s patchwork career of dramas, action thrillers and horror movies. I haven’t seen too many of his films but in the pantheon of bizarro horror the bat-shit weird Gozu stands pretty high.