Audition (2000)

Takashi Miike's Audition opens as a quiet domestic drama about a widower and closes as something we would hesitate to describe in a family newspaper. Shigeharu Aoyama, seven years a widower, is gently pushed toward remarriage by his teenage son. His friend, a film producer, arranges a sham casting call so the grieving man can shop for a wife under the cover of professional duty. He selects Asami, a former ballerina with a still, watchful manner and a résumé composed entirely of dead ends. The first hour is patient, almost tender. The final twenty minutes are not.

The cultural ledger here is thin, and that is the honest finding. The cast is entirely Japanese, which for a Japanese production is simply the cast. There is no racial commentary, no environmental sermon, no economic critique tucked inside the fake audition (the sham is an instrument of loneliness, not of capital), and no engagement with contemporary discourses of the body or the mind. The one live question is whether Asami's climactic vengeance upon the men who lied to her amounts to a feminist statement. Critics in France and Britain believed so. Miike has shrugged. Tom Mes has observed that her victims include a woman, that she lies as freely as she is lied to, and that her motive is pathology, not politics. The film declines the invitation.

What remains is craft. Miike shows rather than tells, never pausing to instruct us on the correct reading of the needle, the wire, or the dog bowl. A quarter century on, the film sits in the canon as a horror landmark and as a mild inconvenience to anyone hoping to conscript it. It offers no program, no moral, no lesson beyond the plainly stated one about lying to strangers. We file it accordingly, with respect and a faint sigh.