Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/01/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, December 1, 2023

Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

Koji Yakusho in Cure

Cast: Koji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara, Tsuyoshi Ujiki, Anna Nakagawa, Misayo Haruki, Yoriko Doguchi, Denden, Ren Osuji, Masahiro Toda, Toji Kawahigashi, Yukijiro Hotaru, Shun Nakayama. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Tokusho Kikumura. Production design: Tomoyuki Maruo. Film editing: Kan Suzuki. Music: Gary Ashiya.

The endings of horror movies typically don't provide a definite resolution of the plot, completely eliminating the cause of the horror, if only to leave things open for a sequel. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is no exception: The ending is a kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it, except that even if you don't blink it's still enigmatic. That's not because Kurosawa has a sequel in mind, but that he wants you to stay as unsettled as you've been throughout the movie. The title is ironic: There's no cure for the "disease" the film has shown us because the dark drives that afflict the characters and the motiveless crimes they commit may be endemic, part of the nature of being human, submerged until something triggers them. Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is a police detective in charge of investigating a series of strange murders in which ordinary, even respected people -- a teacher, a doctor, a policeman -- kill people and leave an X slashed across their chests. In some cases, the victim is close to the killer and in others they're random. Eventually, Takabe discovers that the one link between the killers is that they all came in contact with a very eccentric young man who at first claims to be suffering from amnesia. Takabe discovers that his name is Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), and that he's a former student of psychology with a special interest in the 18th century physician Franz Mesmer, a controversial figure in the use of hypnotism to treat patients. Is Mamiya, whose manner is infuriatingly passive-aggressive, responsible for the psychotic breaks of the unlikely killers? It's a conventional horror-movie plot treated in a brilliantly unconventional way by Kurosawa, who perhaps in his own way hypnotizes the viewer into a persistent sense of dread. The performances by Yakusho and Hagiwara are terrific.