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CURE
8/10
Kyua
: Kiyoshi Kurosawa : Japan 1997 : 111 mins
“Fearsome
… heart of … his … healing hand …
Road
of healing … not a long …
Take sword. A man … but dew.
Heal, O … water-grass! …
O winter … falls … snow.
That … heal … snow.
Take … in hand … heal.”
These
haiku-like words emanate tinnily from an ancient Edison phonograph
machine at the end of Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s tantalisingly metaphysical
version of the serial-killer thriller. Though impenetrably enigmatic at
first glance, they in fact pretty much explain everything that’s gone
before – if anything in this startling, fascinating film can be ‘explained’
at all. Because the bare bones of the plot, while sufficiently original
to have attracted Hollywood attention (remake rights were bought in late
2002, one year after the film’s belated US release) are only the starting-point
for the bizarre journey that is Cure.
World-weary
detective Ken-ichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is having problems at home and
at work: as his wife Fumie (Anna Nakagawa) seems to be succumbing to mental
illness, he’s assigned to a nightmarishly difficult homicide case. While
the victims are killed in identical fashion – and marked with a distinctive
X-shaped wound – the perpetrators are all different: ordinary people suddenly
overtaken by a murderous rage. Takabe’s investigations eventually lead
him to Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) a mysterious, characterless drifter
with an intense interest in the theories of hypnotist Frans Mesmer…
That
Kurosawa is a director of astonishing confidence and technical skill is
apparent from the first scenes in Cure – which also showcase the
impressive contributions from cinematographer Tokusho Kikumura, editor
Kan Suzuki, production designer Tomoyuki Maruo and Gary Ashiya, the man
responsible for the music. This includes the jaunty theme that plays over
the opening titles, accompanying an especially brutal and unexpected eruption
of violence as a woman is beaten to death with a metal pipe – which we’ve
seen ripped off a subway wall in distinctly Argento-ish
style. As the letters of the film’s title slide into view from different
sides of the screen, we see Takabe for the first time, at the wheel of
his car as he drives to the crime-scene. He sighs, quietly but audibly
– a tiny sound-effect integrated with Ashiya’s score in typically virtuoso
style.
Throughout
Cure Kurosawa pays at least as much attention to the sound design
as he does to the visuals – this is a film which deserves to be seen either
in a cinema or through stereo headphones. Like Michael
Mann, he has a precise eye for the environments in which his characters
exist: all are precisely placed in the widescreen frame among a low-key
series of buildings, rooms and urban architecture. And just as Mann re-imagined
Los Angeles in Heat, Kurosawa transcends the basic thriller
aspects of his material to accumulate a wide-ranging exploration of the
Tokyo’s residential and industrial cityscapes: the end titles feature
a static image of a suburban back-alley that wouldn’t look out of place
in the acclaimed portfolios of master urban photographer Naoya Hatakeyama.
Every
dark, ominous frame seems haunted by the doomy spectre of the Aum cult
– whose sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo underground convulsed a society
already jittery at the prospect of the (then-impending) new millennium.
This is a society whose fanatically well-ordered surface is, we see, a
very brittle shell indeed: as Takabe waits to collect his dry-cleaning
at the local laundry, he hears a fellow ‘salary-man’ muttering in what
sounds like a boiling frenzy. There is psychosis in the very molecules
of the air, it seems – and the film makes just as much sense whether Mamiya
is or isn’t the mesmerising monster he appears to be.
The
aggressively enigmatic final scenes, while appearing to unravel the mystery,
on closer examination pose even more questions. Has Mamiya somehow ‘transferred’
his magic to Takabe? Are the killings over, or have they only just begun?
Is Japan about to be plunged into the full-scale apocalypse to rival that
unleashed at the end of Kurosawa’s previous film, Charisma? The
very long last shot – which starts, innocuously enough, with Takabe in
a diner – supports any of these interpretations. But it is, in terms of
the manipulation of sound and image, and the deployment of split-second
editing, a dazzling, frustrating, wildly controversial coup de cinema.
26th
December, 2002
(seen on DVD, 27th July)
For the original
shorter version of this review click here.
by Neil
Young
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