GoodTrash Media

This week, we here at the Frightful Femme decided to take a well-deserved break from horror and delve into a quietly delightful little Japanese rom-com in the form of Takashi Miike’s 1999 classic, Audition (orig. Ôdishon). A charming yet lonely widower, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) has raised his son alone after the untimely passing of his wife. At his now-teenaged son’s suggestion, Aoyama sets out on a quest to meet the perfect woman to end his loneliness: someone serious, but confident; someone pretty, but who isn’t lured by the frivolities to which so many young girls seem to be prone. While discussing his ideal woman with best friend/film producer Yoshikawa, Yoshikawa hatches a scheme to set Aoyama up the only way he knows how: by holding a literal audition to pick the perfect girl for Aoyama to marry.

*WE’RE SORRY. THE MOVIE YOU HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED IS NOT AS IT SEEMS. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR SPOILERS AFTER THE BEEP. (BEEEEP.)*

Oh wait. Except Asami, the girl Aoyama falls madly, desperately in love with, turns out to be a total psychopath who takes childlike joy in dismembering men with piano wire and keeping them as pets in ways that would horrify even the Kathiest of Bates. Did I say this was a romantic comedy? Oops. This film is easily the slowest burn of a horror movie I have ever experienced. At a length just shy of two hours, the only part anyone who’s seen it ever talks about is the last 20 minutes, but boy is that one helluva 20 minutes. The intro hour forty of Audition does, however, do its job of keeping its audience engaged. The first quarter of this film plays as a romantic dramedy with a light sprinkling of intrigue. The plot of a producer setting up a sham audition to find his friend a wife is about as hijinksy as they come, and there are even a few genuine laugh moments. The second act of the film is a bit more of a psychological thriller. When Aoyama takes Asami on a weekend getaway to propose to her, she disappears in the night leaving Aoyama to use the suspiciously little he knows about her to attempt to track her down. In his quest he discovers the bar she claims to have been working at to make ends meet has been closed for a year following a grisly murder/dismemberment in which the police found three extra fingers, a tongue and an ear. Earlier, we learned that the man who was supposed to represent her professionally had also been missing for the better part of a year. Interesting.

In the end, however, Aoyama didn’t really need to worry about finding Asami, because as serial killers tend to be, Asami was gosh darned good at finding him. Cue a particularly gruesome yet subtle torture scene that throws its audience off-kilter by being selective at when to show the gore and when to leave it up to the unforgiving imagination. Ranging from disturbing to painful to downright disgusting (dog bowl dinner, anyone?) the final 20 minutes were infamously enough to warrant a record number of walkouts at the film’s screening at the Rotterdam Film Festival. I won’t go into detail, because quite frankly I won’t do it justice, and if you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it and if you haven’t, then do it. This film is technically perfect. End of review.

Now, this is a FFF (Frightful Femme first) in that this is actually my second viewing of this film. But when I decided to make this month about Japanese horror, this film immediately sprung to mind. I adored this movie the first time I saw it, and then promptly swore to myself I would never watch it again. What I’m trying to say is, you’re welcome. To say that Audition is ripe for feminist analysis would be an understatement. This film could almost play as the opposite side of the coin to Mary Harron’s American Psycho, released the following year. Like Ju-On’s analysis a few weeks ago, it is impossible to view this film without its original context of Japanese culture, which comes with its own set of tropes. Audition takes a particularly close look at the character trope of the yamato nadeshiko, a complicated cultural concept originating in 19^th century patriarchal Japanese society that portrays the ideal woman as strong, yet quiet and feminine, who values honor, respect, and family above all else. The idea itself is not inherently misogynist, though it has a tendency to come off that way to uneducated Westerners (read: opinionated college me). What is misogynist is Aoyama’s idealization of these qualities as he is seeking a mate. Aoyama doesn’t want to meet a partner, but would rather choose from a catalogue, even remarking at one point that he feels like he’s “buying his first car.”

Asami is a really fabulous subversion of the yamato nadeshiko. At first she reads as a textbook example: naturally pretty, but not made-up, thin, delicate, graceful, but with an internal strength forged in fire, suffering a tragically abusive childhood and (supposedly) learning to cope through difficult circumstances. She dresses femininely, and often all in white. A former ballerina and pianist, Asami’s delicacy is pushed almost to the realm of comedy. But her mental fortitude is not quite where it appears to be, and rather than coming to terms with her abuse, she instead turns it on her lovers, subjecting them to the torture she endured in childhood turned up way past 11. Even her weapons are delicate, dismembering with piano wire and slowly, gleefully impaling the most sensitive parts of the body with elegant little acupuncture needles.

Is Aoyama kind of an old-school misogynist in ways he doesn’t realize? Yes. Did he trick a woman that he picked out from a stack of women into meeting him under false pretenses? Yes. Does he necessarily deserve the grotesque retribution of a psychopath for missing his dead wife and loving his son? Heck to the fucking no! I have mentioned in the past taking issue with rape revenge films (a category for which this film qualifies only by the loosest of definitions) but for some reason Asami’s abusive childhood doesn’t bother me quite the way other films’ depictions of rape and abuse as an excuse/motivation for women to be violent do. Perhaps it’s because the degree of her response is so impossibly disproportionate, gruesome and misdirected that it hardly qualifies as a logical cause-effect relationship. I am, however, still eagerly awaiting the day a woman is granted the privilege of going absolutely gleefully psycho-killer with zero justification necessary a la Patrick Bateman. Let us know in the comments if you know of any.