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K
is for Chaos
by
Neil Young
Hideo Nakata's
acclaimed psychological thriller Chaos (Kaosu) finally
makes it to British cinemas this month - a full five years after its Japanese
release. In these days when so many multiplex screens are gobbled up by
a handful of Hollywood blockbusters, we should of course be grateful for
any distributor willing to take a risk on foreign-language imports. Especially
ones like Tartan whose policy - via their annual Asian Extreme programme
- is to introduce relatively "offbeat" titles to major cinema
chains before heading to a profitable home-viewing afterlife.
Devotees of
foreign cinema, meanwhile, know all too well that it's not unusual for
a year or two to elapse between a movie's debut on the international film-festival
circuit and it obtaining UK distribution - which may consist of a couple
of London screens for one or two weeks. "Better late than never"
seems to be many distributor's motto. But the half-decade we've had to
wait for Chaos is mercifully unusual. And the story behind the
delay is an intriguing one - though (thankfully) nowhere near as convoluted
as the movie's own dizzyingly complex plot: a nightmarishly tricky film
to write about for uninitiated audiences, Chaos is a classic example
of the less you know beforehand, the better.
But it won't
be giving too much away to reveal that the picture begins - after an enigmatic,
brief shot of heavy rain pounding tarmac - in a fancy French restaurant.
A middle-aged businessman (Ken Mitsuishi) is dining with a younger woman
(Miki Nakatani). He wears a bandage on his hand, and she has to help him
cut his meat. A short while later, the man pays the bill while the woman
steps out for a cigarette. But when the man follows her into the street,
she's nowhere to be seen. The man returns to his office, where he's identified
as Mr Komiyama. He asks his secretary if his wife Saori has been in touch,
as she seemed to wander off outside the restaurant. His secretary says
not. Soon after, Komiyama receives a telephone call from a man who says
he has kidnapped Saori, and that she'll die unless a large ransom is paid.
Komiyama immediately calls the police...
Throughout
these early sequences, it's clear that something is slightly off-kilter:
most notably the odd behaviour from the young woman in the restaurant
- she spends a little too much time looking into a large mirror near the
entrance. So we aren't that surprised when it soon emerges that nothing
and nobody is quite what they seem: the truth only emerges slowly as the
narrative unfolds backwards in time, showing us the identity of the kidnapper
- a general-purpose handyman named Kuroda (Masato Hagiwara) - and also
how he came to place the call to Komiyama...
Events in
Chaos take increasingly dark and mysterious turns - perhaps too
mysterious at some stages, where narrative opacity seems to be the primary
motivation. But they never quite enter the realms of the supernatural.
This would have been a surprise to many Japanese audiences back in 1999,
given the fact that Nakata's three previous pictures Don't Look Up
(Joyu-rei, aka Ghost Actress, 1996), Ring (Ringu,
1998) and Ring 2 (Ringu 2, 1999) were all, essentially,
ghost-stories. The phenomenal success of Ring and its sequel -
the latter of which Nakata also wrote - had immediately propelled Nakata
to the superstar rank of Japanese directors, spawning a legion of imitators
in what became known as the "new wave of Asian horror."
After Ring
2, Nakata was inevitably offered to complete the trilogy with the
project which became Norio Tsuruta's prequel Ring 0 (Ring 0
- Basudei, 2000). But he preferred a change of direction. Speaking
to Offscreen's Donato Totaro in July 2000, he said that while training
to be a director at Nikkatsu Studios he "was not exactly specializing
or longing for horror films. During my highschool days I can remember
watching The Exorcist, and other horror films that really impressed
me, but I would not say that it was my choice to work exclusively in horror."
Nakata seems
to have stumbled into the genre - as he himself put it in 2002: "It
was accidental. I had to start a new project in order to obtain funding
to finish a documentary film on Joseph Losey which I was making at the
time, as opposed to my really wanting to make a horror movie. I actually
had lots of new projects - horror was one of those. So my motivation to
make horror movies is not pure."
That said,
Chaos does often tiptoe into the clammily claustrophobic zones
familiar from Nakata's Ring movies and Dark Water: there's
the disinterment of troublesome, decomposing corpse; a character seems
to have returned from the dead at one point; the very last shots - which
close the picture on a similarly watery note to its prologue - hint that
one of the main participants might possibly have been some kind of supernatural
being.
And at every
stage Nakata's poised, distanced direction is loaded with the kind of
unease more familiar from the left-field psychodramas of his compatriot
Kiyoshi Kurosawa - most notably Cure (Kyua, 1997) with which
Kaosu shares a leading man (Hagiwara) and a cinematographer (Tokusho
Kikumura, who also did 2003's Ju-On - The Grudge). Indeed, Kaosu's
title fits misleadingly smoothly into Kurosawa's unofficial "K"
series, alongside the spooky likes of Karisuma (1999), Korei
(2000) and Kairo (2001).
But the main
reference points in Hisashi Saito's script (based on the novel The
Woman Who Wanted to be Kidnapped by Shogo Utano) are non-horrific:
critics have drawn comparisons with Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot's
Les Diaboliques and the noir-inflected novels of James M Cain.
The teasingly non-linear structure reminded younger critics of Pulp
Fiction and Memento, and older scribes of Akira Kurosawa's
Rashomon (1951): especially as several sequences in Chaos do
seem, on closer inspection, to slightly contradict each other.
The Kurosawa
connection is perhaps the most appropriate: his Seven Samurai (1954)
- itself a reaction to classic US westerns - inspired George Sturges'
loose American remake The Magnificent Seven (1960) and now, four
decades on and largely thanks to Nakata, American studios are raiding
Japanese back-catalogues like never before. The "new wave" of
Asian horror may have petered out somewhat in Asia itself, but its impact
is now travelling, tsunami-like, across the world.
The first
major splash was made Gore Verbinski's 2002 remake of Ring, renamed
The Ring, and a sufficiently profitable venture that a sequel was
rapidly greenlit. Nakata himself has just finished directing Naomi Watts
and Sissy Spacek in the American version of Ringu 2 for release
in 2005 - an surprisingly rare example of a "name" Japanese
director being invited to ply his trade in the USA. The film may face
competition from an ironic source: MOR arthouse favourite Walter Salles
(Central Station; The Motorcycle Diaries) is directing Jennifer
Connelly in Dark Water, based on Nakata's 2002 picture of the same
name (originally entitled Honogurai mizu no soko kara).
Also due in
2005 is the long-gestating remake of Kaosu itself: Robert De Niro
and Benicio Del Toro are signed up as husband and kidnapper respectively,
with Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast; Birth) set to direct a script
by Andrew Bovell (Strictly Ballroom; Lantana) which is reportedly
very nearly completed. The presence of such high-calibre names, and Nakata's
own fast-increasing renown, are obvious triggers for Tartan's exhumation
of Kaosu.
Of course,
not everyone is thrilled with Hollywood's current fascination for all
things 'Asian Extreme' - it's arguably harder to get a genuinely original
idea off the ground than ever before (unless you're Charlie Kaufman and/or
Spike Jonze), and producers are increasingly playing it safe by picking
up projects which have already established their commercial pedigree in
the tough far-eastern market. But Nakata's next big horror project is
a remake of The Entity - Sidney J Furie's paranormal thriller from
1981 starring Barbara Hershey as a woman seemingly raped by an invisible
demon - which suggests that, for one director at least, the trans-Pacific
traffic in ideas is by no means a one-way system.
October
31st, 2004
originally
written for and published in IMPACT
magazine
For the original,
shorter review of Chaos click
here
by Neil
Young
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