Miike Takashi -- The City of Lost Souls
… a Yakuza eats a blue Popsicle in the harbour, while bodies are packed into oil barrels …
"I may not look like a compassionate person, but I am very grateful," says Japanese director, Miike Takashi,
during an introduction at the 1998 Vancouver Film Festival. "My film's seem to be wandering out into the world
on their own," he says through a translator during an interview at the Toronto Film Festival, in town to promote
his movie, The City of Lost Souls. Not many people have seen his movies, and the ones, who have seen one of his
movies, probably haven't seen the same one. But the buzz on Takashi is rapidly gaining momentum.
"I also make stuff that would never make it into a film festival," says Takashi. He has 8 movie releases
on his filmography from 1998 to 2000 alone. Skipping film school, Takashi was assistant to the great Japanese director
Shohei Imamura on Zegen and Black Rain. He went on to make low-budget ($500-600,000) movies primarily for video
or satellite distribution in Japan - sometimes, they're released in the Japanese cinema for one or two weeks, just
to advertise the video. Says Takashi, "In the world of the Japanese low budget film it often occurs that one
operates on a project and coincidentally encounters another project, which itself sounds more interesting. Then
one simply changes projects."
Commenting on two of Japan's most known directors on the international art cinema scene, Shinya Tsukamoto and Takeshi
Kitano, Takashi says, "I think they have been critically appreciated in Japan. The problem is it's very difficult
to recoup films only on theatrical release. And, of course, if you take Kitano or Tsukamoto, it's very hard to
imagine them having ancillary markets for action figures."
One of Takashi's many latest movies, City of Lost Souls, is particularly unusual in the world of Japanese cinema,
because the two leading characters are a Brazilian male and a Chinese female (played by Michele Reis, who was the
killer's girlfriend/boss in the Wong Kar-Wai movie, Fallen Angels). It represents a demographic reality that Japan,
in its movies or larger culture, doesn't necessarily want to reflect - a burgeoning unofficial version. The governor
of Tokyo, Ishihara, was embroiled in controversy in late 1999 for statements that "third-world nationals"
(ie. other Asians and Iranians and so on) were responsible for most of Tokyo's crime. Further, there's a special
Japanese word for foreigners who come over to Japan, to make money, and then return home to where their currency's
substantially weaker, taking that money with them. Anyway, they probably can't settle in Japan, which is notoriously
difficult for foreigners to be naturalized.
"It seems like the Japanese have lost their interest in their own cities and their own country," says
Takashi. "They seem to have become numb." Numb, for instance, to the fact that Japan is fast becoming
something other than the homogenous country everyone thinks it is. "I think that actually Tokyo is much more
of a mish-mish than that culturally and racially," says Takashi. "The fact is that it's apparent before
your eyes, living in Tokyo or Osaka. These cities have really changed in the past years. They represent a full
mix of Asian cultures now. Actually, the Yakuzas are very influenced by foreign cultures these days. Foreigners
have entered their world, and they have to deal with it now. It is the same with the contemporary Japanese society.
If you walk down the streets in Shibuya, there are Iranians trying to sell you stuff."
Takashi's film, Rainy Dogs, does take place on rain-soaked streets, except it's Taipei, a city that Takashi regards
with great affection, rather than Tokyo. He says, "Taipei looks like Tokyo in the 60s and 70s. The people
look more alive, more human. Tokyo isn't a place you can stay. A lot of Japanese people think the same way. They
feel like there's no place to go back to. While filming Rainy Dogs, staying at the hotel, it felt very comfortable.
I can't be comfortable in Tokyo. Everybody in Japan is thinking, 'There should be somewhere we have to return.'"
"All the characters in my movies are looking for a place to settle," says Takashi. Inasmuch as a theme
can persist in a filmography so all-over-the-place, this is it.
Seemingly, the only kind of movie Takashi hasn't made is a romance. "That's because I don't understand woman
very well," he says. He's directed a mystical voyage into the heart of China, Bird People of China; a horror
movie called Audition based on a Ryu Murakami story (whose most well known novel was about two babies left for
dead in a coin locker, who went on to hellblaze a trail through Tokyo, yet retained beauty and high style throughout);
and scores of shady, violent Yakuza movies, like Shinjuku Triad Society, which came through the Vancouver Film
Festival in 1997, and also Blues Harp and Rainy Dogs; DOA, which will be the first Takashi movie to get a wider
American distribution.
"I'm not especially conscious that I have a style of my own," says Takashi of his sometimes flashy style.
"And I certainly don't shoot for a jump cut or that staccato editing. I think for many different reasons whether
I just want to speed up the tempo of the film or play to a particular scene, but I don't think of it as a style
that I cultivated. Some people would say that my films devolve in my editing. But I always like the concept of
scratching, like with records when I was a kid, so maybe my editing is like a form of scratching. I cannot watch
TV without a remote control. There are times when I find all those noises and sound effects quite noisy and rackety
in my own head, but I don't quite have the will to eliminate them yet."
City of Lost Souls, is based on a serialized weekly Hasue Senchu that broke sales records in the not-so-small,
not-so-underground Japanese market for extremely violent novels (in the form of manga). It features an unusually
stylish version of the Yakuza. "I think there's some fundamental interest or respect for the outlaws in Japan,"
says Takashi. "If they're going to be that irredeemably bad, they might as well look cool. Actually, the clothes
were designed individually for all the main characters by a Japanese designer. And then the designer brought over
a London stylist, who implemented them. But I think the real Japanese yakuza have their own profound aesthetics
that no stylist can emulate, whether she comes from London or not. And I think no matter how much we take pictures
and try to recreate it, as long as the person wearing the clothing is an actor and not a real yakuza, it's going
to be different."
"The locations that are in both the original model and the script are actually places that are actually extremely
difficult to get access to to shoot," says Takashi, "And rather than try to butt your head against the
impossible, for not very effective results, in other words go to places that are really quite shut off from and
invisible to the public eye, so I never intended to take a really realistic approach, so in a way it's kind of
a mixed bag of Tokyo and Los Angeles landscapes. And I think if we had taken the original landscapes and the original
locations and the real violence of the original and put them together, they wouldn't have come up together into
a very convincing movie. You can't adapt a Hasue book into a good film without violence, so the only thing I could
play with were the locations and the look of the locations."
Takashi's violence makes you wince. He says, "I want to shoot violent scenes, but not action scenes. The blood
and pain makes it more real to the audience. Hollywood can make nice, violent movies, but I can't. In my films,
people are like monsters or beasts. Their violence is extreme but at least honest."
But in Takashi's films, even the most murderous and cunning gangsters are impossible not to love a little. In Blues
Harp, the internal motivations of about 10 characters sway the movie to its emotional saturated and bloody climax.
It's a complex web of loyalty and greed and responsibility and longing and need, which begins when Chuji, a half-Black,
small time drug dealer, nightclub manager, saves the life of Kenji, an upstart Yakuza, who hides from pursuers
in the club Chuji works at. Chuji plays a mean blues harp. And Kenji is an upstart Yakuza, planning to replace
his boss, in conspiracy with the boss' mistress - each time he has sex with her, he vigorously brushes his teeth
afterwards and throws up, unaware in one instance, that the middle aged woman is behind him. Though she's no innocent,
you feel such sympathy when you see the deep hurt in her eyes, while a trickle of blood from her period runs down
her leg. As events unfold, an adorable and sweet girlfriend enters Chuji's life - in fact, their relationship begins
on the same night that Chuji saves Kenji's life by hiding him, in the back of the club, from his pursuers. Kenji's
gratitude runs deep, very deep - but unfortunately, Kenji's sideman grows intensely jealous at Kenji's love for
Chuji. The movie speeds towards its climactic day -- in the afternoon, Chuji finds out his girlfriend's pregnant
('It's a strange feeling. I'm being needed,' he says), that a record label president is coming to see him play
at the club at 7:00, and through blackmail, he's been selected to kill the Yakuza boss. And so the movie draws
closer to its heartbreak ending, in which Kenji finds out at the very last minute that Chuji has been set up. Kenji
saves Chuji, getting shot several times in the process. Kenji's boss tells him, "Never underestimate a woman.
They don't see blood every month for nothing." Fleeing the scene, Chuji wants to take Kenji to the hospital,
but Kenji insists they go to the club where Chuji's supposed to be playing. While Kenji bleeds to death in the
car, Chuji takes to the stage - as his stage-momentum grows, you see the gangsters enter from the back of the room,
force their way through the crowd, someone walks up to the stage, pulls out a gun, and the screen goes black. The
movie ends twenty years in the past with an overhead shot of Chuji as a small boy walking with his black GI father
on a dusty road, in the middle of a crop field, leading to the beautiful, blue ocean. Likely, it's Okinawa. More
than a Yakuza movie, Blues Harp is a tearjerker. If most of these characters are monsters, they're not without
tenderness.
"One may be able to say these are violent movies, but actually Blues Harp is about friendship," says
Takashi. "And Rainy Dogs is about relationship between father and son. But I don't want to show it obviously.
Basically, my approach to make an interesting film is that I need to find feelings and emotions that I have lost."
(An article focusing on Takashi's film, The Bird People In China, appeared in Space Age Bachelor issue #1.3.)
(Two interviews were done for this article - one by Donald Anderson during the Vancouver Film Festival, one by
Jason Anderson during the Toronto Film Festival - moreover, a few quotes in the article were borrowed from a Takashi
interview I found at the following website: www.fantasiafest.com )
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Miike Takashi -- The City of Lost Souls
a Yakuza eats a blue Popsicle in the harbour, while bodies are packed into oil barrels.
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