Strange Pleasures: Audition
Column
Strange Pleasures: Audition
Audition (1999)
Column
BY
Beatrice Loayza
Strange Pleasures is a regular Metrograph column in which writer Beatrice Loayza shares unconventional desires found across underground and mainstream cinema alike.
Audition plays at 7 Ludlow from May 20 as part of Louise Bonnet Selects.
Takashi Miike’s Audition was for me what it was for many fledgling cinephiles: an introduction. An introduction to the kind of body horror that actually stings—none of that numbing torture-porn white noise that emerged throughout the aughts around the time the cult following around Miike’s film was beginning to grow. Surely Audition, with its final act explosion of vomit and bone-slicing, anticipated the Saw and Hostel craze. The latter’s director, Eli Roth, even cited Audition as a key influence on his 2005 film, which follows the latest victims of an organization that kidnaps people to be maimed and slaughtered by their wealthy clients. Saw, too, delights in murder as variety show, which Audition does not. In part, it is a women’s revenge story—the type that challenges our sympathies by the grotesque, unjustifiable nature of the revenge itself. The film introduced me to this, too, the appeal of a woman’s monstrosity. And it doesn’t hurt that Asami (Eihi Shiina) performs her dismemberments in style. Long black gloves. A leather apron. The hard against the soft of Asami’s other half, the demure Asami in all-white cotton skirts and prim sweaters. Asami the torturess—the one with zest, joie de vivre, like a newly-fed vampire— is the one the girls actually want to be.
When I mentioned I was writing about Audition to a friend, he mocked it as a “girl-boss” movie, and, indeed, the label applies to several (recent) rape-revenge movies that perfunctorily capitalize on the genre’s claim to women’s empowerment. Is Audition empowering because Asami fucks up the men in her life? The men who want to trap her in their cages of unreal, idealized femininity? Because Asami’s trauma is given full, feverish expression? Because her madness is the long-term consequence of violent abuse at the hands of a childhood dance instructor who once branded her flesh? Or is Audition misogynist? Is Asami an angel, a devil, but never really a human—the mere manifestation of a man’s greatest dreams and darkest nightmares? It’s no wonder the film has endured. These questions are evergreen.
Audition (1999)
The first half of the film basks in the halcyon glow of first love, with widower Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) falling for the demure former ballerina—his pick of the lot, quite literally, after his friend assembles dozens of bachelorettes for his inspection under the guise of a movie audition. There’s a giddy, poptimistic tone to this section of the film, playing like a straight romance from the deluded perspective of Shigeharu, who ignores all the signs of foul play—the lies about her education, her connection to missing persons, the bulky burlap sack lurking in a corner of her home. Eventually, the film’s undercurrent of darkness surfaces, breaking the story into oneiric fragments as Shigeharu witnesses, but refuses to believe, the true nature of his new love. And thus commences Miike’s Grand-Guignol closing act: Asami’s past lover emerges from the sack, a deformed pile of flesh, his body physically sculpted into a state of submission. The thing lives only for Asami. It feasts on her regurgitations. When Asami discovers there are others in Shigeharu’s life—that he also loves his son, that he continues to cherish the memory of his deceased wife—she lashes out and, with the assist of an injection that immobilizes the body but preserves sensation, begins to turn him into one of her creatures, sawing off his legs, puncturing his eyes. Making him ugly and totally hers.
Fittingly, I’m writing this in Paris, where another film about mad love—love that deforms and repulses—was tonight playing at the Christine Cinéma Club. The gross production history of Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the abuse experienced by Maria Schneider at the hands of Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando is no small thing, but not enough has been said about the parallels between her ordeals and the story itself, which pits a dingy, id-fueled sexual relationship against a vacuous romance (Brando’s Paul versus Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Tom, a filmmaker who only cares about love insofar as he can spin it into frothy fodder for his movies). There is a truth to the way the film depicts vile men and broken women, their desires warped to the point of obscenity, thus the Francis Bacon paintings that can be seen in the opening credits, two bodies that look more like snatches of meat. Funny that Asami’s creations, horrific embodiments brought to life by the mad lover herself, call to mind the tormented figures of Bacon works, too. Perhaps Asami is an artist.
Audition (1999)
