Review by Beatrice On 27-Jun-2023
Love is giving what you do not have to someone who does not want it
After 23 years since its first release, Takeshi Mike's restored masterpiece Audition is presented at the Udine Far East Film Fest.
It will finally be released in Italian theaters distributed by Wanted.
As the child brings a handmade gift to his dying mother, Shigeharu Aoyama becomes a widower with a dependent child.
After 7 years, the now teenage Shigehiko invites him to look for a wife, and Aoyana tells his producer friend about it.
The latter suggests that he organize a fictitious casting call, with a radio release, inviting young women in their 20s and 30s to come forward to play the lead in a film as a "heroine of tomorrow."
Hundreds of resumes arrived, which Aoyana examined, being particularly impressed by that of a young former ballet dancer.
"Never had it been so difficult to choose," the widower reveals to his friend, "except for the last car purchased!"
The auditions begin, the two friends' questions pressing, at times intrusive, until the interview with the young Asami confirms the widower's spell.
Although the producer friend's advice is not to call her, to wait and investigate the girl's past, she represents the hyperuranic image of the average man's woman, sensitive, in need of protection, innocent and fragile, yet caring and fit to care exclusively for her man.
According to the two aging singles, "the girls of yesteryear are no more" so it is necessary to seek them out through deception.
Even the young son does not trust his father's naivete; he, a biology scholar interested in dinosaurs, knows that snappers are born male, then become hermaphrodites, and only then male or female..
As Asami Yamasaki waits for Aoyana's calls while sitting on the floor with a jute sack in front of her moving around, Takashi Miike begins to confirm the first doubts about the widower's expectations.
First weekend by the sea, as Aoyana makes plans for the evening, the maiden begins to undress and lie on the bed sinuously meandering design.
Dreams, nightmares, flashbacks, visions, hallucinations open the second half of the film, where "only pain and suffering make you realize what kind of man you are," the sweet maiden claims.
Amid abuse and torture, amputations and paralyzing instruments Asami whispers softly that "words create only lies, pain, on the other hand, does not lie..."
Truth is the error that escapes into 'deception and is caught up in misunderstanding
Takashi Mike, constructs a sophisticated checkerboard of characters to present his worldview, "Japan is finished," and the resulting portrait is extremely effective. Those who speak of horror confuse interpretive developments.
The vision of the male recluse in his manly reactionary world unable to confront the other whatever he may be, leads back to the Lacanian vision of the 'nonexistence of sexual intercourse and the relationship between alterities.
Theidiocy of the phallus, the duty of enjoyment of the capitalist's discourse in this psycho-drama is met with the dullness of the feminine demand for love due to its traumatic, cultural identity fragility.
If anything, the horror and violence are in the inability to grasp the horror perpetrated by an unseen, undetected, unperceived, ignored, skillfully removed world.
Takashi Miike's skill lies in making it visible, lies in the construction of an extremely rational, logical, mathematical script where "perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age."
Nothing is easier than delusion, for what every man desires, he also believes to be true, Demosthenes argues, and perhaps the only true reality is the deception present in our minds, Takashi Miike certifies.
27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice