Film: Izo (2004) - Miike

[Fausty]

Umm. . . wow.

This is Miike at his most intense, most challenging, and most elliptically rewarding. Not for the impatient, or expectant of rigid narrative arc exposition style. Not as unconstrained as Visitor Q, but far from the self-contained, brutal storytelling of Audition or Imprint.

Unsettling, unplugged performances by Kazuki Tomokawa are mixed throughout and while such a technique absolutely shouldn't work - it should seem tendentious or even trite - they actually raised the hair in the back of my neck several times. More than once, the shadow of the cameraman can be seen during these emotionally raw expositions, which for me at least blurred my comfortable distance from "the action" too far for easy viewing - similar to some of the too-raw-to-be-healthy imagery of Visitor Q.

Basically, this is yet one more reason that I find Miike to be a director who does things with movies I've never seen others try - let alone succeed at. And I'm not even getting to Ichi the Killer yet - a movie so dense with interwoven strands of substance and referentiality that it makes Bach's Art of the Fugue seem almost "thin."

Reminds me a bit of Death Trance and Versus, the former directed by action coolster Tak Sakaguchi and the latter starring him. But layered with that extra level of challenge and sub-linguistic content that Miike seems to be able to summon at will, in any genre.

Tonight, mourning an unthinkable loss and listening to the cold wind howl through the dark hours of June, I wasn't at all sure a movie would hold me together. Izo did more than that - it pulled me back, to look from a distance, and think about the sorts of things I used to need good psychedelics to see.

The movie concludes with a spoken poem, the last half of which is translated as follows:

“What is striking the ground with voices is
the confused sound of blood in a shining person.
And what belongs to only me is dropping one after another.

Listen, my dear, how did you live and what did you see?
You are different from anyone else.
You are different from anyone else.
The night is far advanced.
And the full moon is shining.
You can go anywhere from here.
You can become anybody.
You are eating, keeping your eyes wide open.
You are enjoying the food.
you are eating, keeping your eyes wide open.

This happens to everyone.
You will become a bird.
In place of the hometown you abandoned
you will have a sheet of the new sky.”

Peace,

Fausty

 

[XiolaBleu]

Beautiful film.

 

[L2R]

rate it

 

[colors]

this film shows real ambition from Miike. the narrative is extremely complex, full of symbolism, very philosophical and deep. a friend said it parallels Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but i haven't read much Nietzsche so i can't comment on that. the inclusion of Kazuki Tomokawa is really cool. i love Miike and applaud him for taking a stab at a serious art film. if the aesthetic was better, and he tightened this up a bit it would have been perfect. something to re-watch several times and ponder. 4/5

 

[IcebergSlim]

- a movie so dense with interwoven strands of substance and referentiality that it makes Bach's Art of the Fugue seem almost "thin."

that had to be quoted

 

[psood0nym]

this film shows real ambition from Miike. the narrative is extremely complex, full of symbolism, very philosophical and deep. a friend said it parallels Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but i haven't read much Nietzsche so i can't comment on that.

I thought the same! Izo is like if Nietzsche directed Jodorowsky's, The Holy Mountain. Izo is on a quest to avenge his own existence through violent and irrational passion, hack slashing his way through war mongers, holy men, defiant toddlers, and other incarnations of social and spiritual power. (He kills almost everybody he encounters except for a few farmers he stays with, as, I think, they represent Zarathustra's conception of The Earth.) He kept slaughtering people for too long after the point had come across, but I'm still giving this film 5/5 because of its arresting imagery (like scene with the general and the skull) and uncompromising ambition.

Some advice for those not familiar with Japanese history and mythology: look up the characters portrayed in Izo on Wikipedia or something before watching the film, since their symbolic import is substantial.

[A few minor spoilers follow]: I watched part of the second disc, which contained interviews with cast members and staff. It's incredible to me that so many of the Japanese film industry's elite had roles or made cameos in a work like this. I mean, imagine Nichole Kidman pulling a sword out of her vagina, or Tom Cruise cutting his way out of the Karmic cycle to return to the site of the bloody crucifixion where he shat himself, then trade places with his betrayer, and ultimately be re-born as a new principle of reality after uniting with the personification of his hair-bug-eating soul fragment (let's say Angelina Jolie)! Miike has some major sway. That's a very good thing.

Edit:

Izo did more than that - it pulled me back, to look from a distance, and think about the sorts of things I used to need good psychedelics to see.

I forgot to mention I watched this film on a combination of aMT and 2C-E. Beauty, brutality, and profundity seemed triple-fold, and some images took on textures true to life. I was completely enthralled, but considering the reactions of others I've observed and read of watching intense films like this on psychedelics, I wouldn't recommend enhanced viewing unless your the experience junkie type.