Film Review:
Audition
Audition is genuine
genius.
Have You Ever Had
Loveless Sex?
AOYAMA is a widower –
his wife died when his son was still a child, and now he’s middle
aged and his son and friends are convinced that he it is about time
he found himself a new wife. His friend Yoshikawa has a plan. He’s
a film producer, and a new cheap film his company are producing are
auditioning women who may be suitable for Aoyama. With this in mind,
he co-opts the auditions as a job interview for Aoyama to find his
new wife.
It soon becomes clear
that Aoyama, however, having already read through the applications
for the role, has only one woman in mind: the quiet and shy Asami.
Despite Yoshikawa’s misgivings about the mysterious woman, Aoyama
begins a relationship with her.
Much of the early tone
of the movie is funny. In many ways, it plays out like a romcom that
doesn’t understand how deeply creepy and misogynistic its premise
is. It would not be the first either.
Audition isn’t a
romcom.
To Scar a
Generation
THE mid-00s saw rise to
what seemed to be the culmination of sensationalist violence in
horror cinema (and fiction in general): torture porn, or gornography.
A sub-genre of cinema whose use of shock tactics are tuned up so high
that they literally use torture to titillate audiences. The Saw
franchise and the films of Eli Roth are the most obvious and
well-known examples of the sub-genre.
Seven years before
Roth's Hostel and six years before the first Saw film, Takeshi
Miike's Audition scarred an audience by avoiding such excesses. It is
often listed amongst the great torture porn films, and one set-piece
is infamous for its gratuity, yet Audition is an exercise in
restraint. That one of the founding films of this genre is bloodless
should tell you a lot about the power of its imagery, and the
director’s control of tension.
No Safety
IF the horrific climax
of the movie is the part that everyone remembers, it works so well
because of the set-up. So much of the movie consists of not much
happening, and somehow it’s a tough, tough sit.
Everything that creates
this feeling is very quiet and subtle. There’s no jump scares and
little scary music, and not horror set-pieces and a lot of quiet
emotional discussions. Audition feels incredibly unsafe without ever
doing anything that feels unsafe, exactly. It’s all so subtly
wrong, so off, so simmering. When Audition hits like a truck, it is
because it has spent the runtime softening you up. It’s a testament
to the fact that any emotional or memorable moments in stories are
defined more by the rest of the story than they are by the power of
the visuals.
Singularity of Purpose
ALTHOUGH Audition
successfully uses a fairly diverse cocktail of tones (at times going
so far as being funny), it is a very focussed and simple story. It
takes care to introduce us to the internal world of the characters,
as much through visuals as through actual plot points. It has a
slight plot; not particularly much really happens. Big revelation and
twists happen within the context of the final scenes.
Some stories are all
about a single scene or moment. Most obviously are twist movies in
horror or psychological thrillers – it was all in their head all
along. Shamylan’s Sixth Sense came out the same year as Audition
and is one of the most recogniseable examples of this. In a totally
different medium, Final Fantasy 7 is another contemporary of
Audition’s that does this effectively. Audition, of course, does
this too. Big emotional moments and narrative slight of hands are
saved for the correct moment and, to repeat a phrase I used earlier,
it hits like a train.
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