DEAD OR ALIVE
Takshi Miike, 1999,
Japan
Writer: Ichiro Ryo
The first 10 minutes of Miike’s ‘Dead or Alive’ are so breathless with sex, shock, violence, music,
colour, parody and back-story that you are likely to feel your jaw widening.
The film is counted in by the protagonists… “1, 2, 3 -” … and then we’re off
with a kaleidoscope of falling corpses, Kôji Endô’s industrial rock track, frenzied
editing cutting across a number of stories and characters, food gorging, outrageous
coke-sniffing, strip joints, breasts and gyrations, shotguns, supermarkets, gay
toilet sex and assassinations, machine guns… and so on. It seems that when
Miike was handed a typical gangster script, he just condensed it down to this
giddy opening. As far as kinetic introductions go, it’s a virtuoso piece. It
encapsulates how inventive Miike can be at a dizzying speed, how shocking he is
(you won’t wonder where accusations of misogyny come from but the bathroom
killing won’t win many fans from the gay community either: Miike’s shocks
embrace everyone). And that’s even before the opening finishes with a
bloodbath, which perhaps neatly provides a keen metaphor for one of Miike’s
approaches: take a bunch of people… characters or the audience, maybe... and
throw a grenade amongst them. As well as machine gun fire. Unpredictable,
unfettered, quite brilliant. Miike is simultaneously gung-ho and perfectly in
control. As
Chuck Bowen says:
“In the Dead or
Alive trilogy and many other films, Miike demolishes
singularity of tone, implicitly suggesting such values to be bourgeoisie
luxuries appeasing conditioned expectations and responses.”
Hold your breath.
And then the bigger shock is that ‘Dead or Alive’ is then not that high octane thriller that perhaps
the introduction implies: instead, it is more of a character study of two men
on the opposite sides of the law and their ties to family and macho obsessions.
V-cinema superstars
Riki Takeuchi and Shô Aikawa are the through-line of the ‘Dead or Alive’ films, although they do not play the same
characters: this is equally a showbiz conceit and implies themes of
reincarnation. Perhaps inevitably, it’s the Miike shock-factor that comes up
front but his films are also typified by melancholia. They may be mad and bad
but they are also equally downbeat and haunting. It’s his nimble way with genre
and his simultaneous disregard and understanding of them that makes Miike’s
nonsense more credible than a lot of Eastern madcap romps. It’s a deep-rooted
restlessness that always makes him interesting and this attention can be
remarkable when it focuses: it’s then we get the likes of ‘Audition’, ‘Rainy Dog’
and ’13 Warriors’. His agenda that
anything can be used makes sentimentality just another colour – before the car
explodes. So when the kinetic opening of ‘Dead
or Alive’ gives way to character studies of two gangster genre archetypes –
the macho steely gangster who is so full
of machismo he is barely able to talk and is quite unable to sit with his legs
closed (Riki Takeuchi); the dogged policeman obsessed with his work at the
expense of his family (Aikawa Shô) – it really shouldn’t be a surprise. This also acts as a
satire of crime genre machismo, but it’s a while before that becomes clear.
Meanwhile, we have the tale of a small group of yakuza hoodlums run by
Ryuichi (Riki) taking on the Japanese and Chinese mafias. Ryuichi’s younger
brother returns from studies but is mortified to find his education was funded
with blood money. Detective Jojima
(Shô) is determined to stop them even as domestic demands for cash for his ill daughter’s
treatment lead him to corruption and his boss seems to be saying don’t work too hard. Against these
family concerns, events veer wildly from the appalling to the blackly comic to
the tragic and maudlin, often within the same scene. For example, the scene
where the girl of the gang is murdered by enema, laying in a pool of her own
faeces whilst the underworld boss soliloquises about his lot (a small penis) is
weirdly full of as much pathos as disgust and produces a response beyond mere
horror.
So when we get to the final showdown, it really isn’t so much
of a surprise when these guys turn into cartoon characters that can produce
rocket launchers and superhero-like balls of power from thin air. That their
fight devastates the world is where the film can be seen to parody the genre:
two big stars get together and – pow! Or
this is simply a dig at those denouements when the good guy and the bad guy
faceoff and it all gets increasingly
ridiculous. Miike didn’t want to kill one of the main stars so this was his
solution. It’s certainly a baffling lurch from the subtleties of the story up
to then, but still further evidence of Miike’s “fuck it” style. It’s certainly
memorable.
DEAD OR ALIVE 2:
BIRDS
DEAD OR ALIVE 2: TÔBÔSHA
Takashi Miike, 2000,
Japan
Writer: Masa
Nakamura
‘Dead or Alive 2:
Birds’ may not have the jaw-dropping intro of its predecessor, but the
opening is no slouch at all. A boy stands in a room (?); a title card says
“Where are you?” and we cut to a vision of the planets (whoa? – picking up
where the first left off?); and then a man – whose penchant for magic provides
many minor highlights – tells a story of warring underworld gangs using
cigarette packets, setting off a hit that doesn’t quite go according to plan.
The killer with the bleached blond hair – who we recognise as Aikawa Shô from
the first film – sees another hit-man doing the job and he recognises him as an
old childhood friend – Takeuchi Riki from the first film. Nevertheless, Shô collects the
pay anyway. These first ten minutes knock out an inventive exposition, a hook,
offbeat comedy and existential angst without barely breaking into a sweat. It
occurs to me that the cigarette packet moment, in an American gangster film
(say, by Scorsese or Tarantino), would be one to be elevated into the pop
culture pantheon of endlessly mimicked and quoted film scenes. But for Miike,
it’s just another inventive offbeat moment. These moments are usually all over
the place in a Miike film.
Then the film strides into a sequence where the film acts
like a trailer of itself.
There is no actual connection to the first ‘Dead or Alive’ except for the
underworld setting, but whereas the first used the “opposite-sides-of-the-law-but-really-the-same”
narrative, ‘Birds’ is grounded in the
“childhood friends” theme that the gangster genre subsists on. Miike is taking
us to one of the essences of the gangster genre, namely framing gangster
friendships in a sentimental and nostalgic light (which has never been done
better than Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon A
Time in America’). This allows the characters to shed as many tears as
bullets as they are murdering friends and cohorts or watching everyone they’ve
grown up with die. Miike throws in flashbacks in faintly baffling spurts to
colour in the history and to provide jigsaw pieces of information for the
audience to piece together. It is here that Miike surprises again by showing
this most outrageous and fickle of directors can also serve up focused
sentiment. At its most touching: a gorgeous-looking and amusing vignette of the
boys on the beach; and then a moving sequence where as adults they are reunited
and recreate the fooling around of their orphanage days. But there is also an
eerie flashback when one boy returns home one day to find his foster father
dying, covered in blood; a moment that distorts both visually and auditory in a
fleeting scene that would match anything spooky by David Lynch.
Miike tears through tonal shifts and genre motifs without
either pausing for breath or losing his grip. It is obvious that Miike is a
master of genre-mash-ups. Soon, he is cutting between a slightly obscene play
for children and nasty gangland massacre. Our two hit-men are going to perform
in the play with a theatre group (who have lost a couple of members in an
auto-accident, a scene punctuated with cartoon crash sounds) but they have a
shady reputation of misbehaving at plays when they were kids, so the theatre
owner is panicking when the hall fills up, and then: “Oh, Hello Mr. Mayor!”
It’s all very much provincial comedy. Meanwhile, gangsters are blasted whilst
having sex during a gangland slaughter, etc. Further meanwhile: the school play
about loneliness and advocating togetherness includes inappropriate penis gags.
Miike alternates between farce and bloodshed, reinforcing the question of what
lays between children and the killers they become.
The film veers again: our hit-men, moved
by their return to innocence or at least childishness and imagination, decide
to use their skills as assassins to rid the world of bad guys and use the money
to pay for vaccines for Third World Children: this is apparently what Shô has
been doing all along and Rikki joins him happily. Our assassins kill for the
starving even as they gorge themselves on noodles (food and bonding is a
frequent motif). Miike has no qualms about utilising real footage of Third
World children for his gangster fantasia: indeed, Miike can and will use
anything, appropriate or not. The film’s harshest criticism of crime seemingly is that it deprives needy children. This leads the assassins to also become
literal avenging angels when they sprout wings.
But finally a lifestyle shall catch up, vengeance
breeds vengeance and these assassin-heroes get shot down (and we see their
murderers as the children they once were too), yet that is not the end, for there’s
genre satire to be had. They drag themselves soaked in blood, for at least a
day, back to the ferry and their childhood home – stopping to help tourists
take photos - as if insisting that they stumble relentlessly to the most sentimental ending they
possibly can. This is surely just as unfeasible as the other ‘DOA’ endings with plausibility being
determinedly elastic. But it seems more appropriate to see this not only as
genre parody but also the last fantasy of dying hit-men – perhaps just like the
finale of the film’s predecessor, it shouldn’t quite be trusted.
In the end, Miike leaves us with
one final vision, full of tenderness, anger and possibility: the tiny fists of
babies. That this is a symbol of hope rather than mawkishness shows again that
Miike’s anything-goes aesthetic has a sharp focus and that perhaps the biggest
surprise for his audience is his capacity for humanity as well as shock and
horror.
DEAD OR ALIVE:
FINAL
Takashi Miike,
2002, Japan
Writers: Hitoshi
Ishikawa, Yoshinobu Kamo, Ichiro Ryu
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Again, working only to his own agenda, Miike completes
his ‘Dead or Alive’ trilogy with a
science-fiction thriller. We are introduced to this future world – which looks
very much like a low-budget dystopia – with a scene of a dirigible passing over
the streets with the film’s title to Kôji Endô’s
faux-Vangelis music. ‘Final’ is
indeed partly a ‘Blade Runner’
pastiche: for example, a running gag is that there’s a guy that runs around
continuously playing saxophone solos. Our lead hero Ryô (Shô Aikawa) is indeed
a “replicant” (so the subtitles say), an affable android drifter who, when
attacked or protecting street kids and with the help of a little 'Matrix'-style
bullet-time, becomes a deadly killing machine. He ends up joining a small gang
of rebels who refuse to take Dictator Wu’s birth control pills and reserve the
right to have babies. Dictator Wu (Richard Chen) has more-or-less outlawed
heterosexual procreation – his philosophy seeming to be that too many people
means that war and devastation is inevitable and that homosexuality is the cure
– and seems to rule a shabby post-apocalyptic society like some guerrilla
leader in a run-down nation. There is really no extravagance or dazzling set
design here. Indeed, it is all filmed with a slightly jaundiced and
sickly-looked filter. Meanwhile, 0fficer Honda (Aikawa Shô) hunts the rebels
and replicants for the Mayor… |
It might be expected that Miike’s science-fiction would
have all the razzle-dazzle of the previous ‘DOA’
films, but this is the most aesthetically restrained entry, looking like a no-budget straight-to-video cash-in with a
couple of intriguing diversions that, really, don’t go so far and where the characters
just seem to come a full stop. And then any internal logic is jettisoned for the
typically outrageous finale.
'Final’ has its one truly eerie moment
when, having tried to commit suicide, Honda’s wife lays half-dead on the bed
sparking electricity.
The fight scenes are executed with flare, using
wire-work and a brush of digital effects but these are used with restraint. Mostly, the story mopes around Ryô and the
rebels whilst they attempt an attack on Wu and then find their numbers dwindling
down to nothing due to incompetence and betrayal. This includes their
accidentally kidnapping Officer Honda’s son which triggers a subplot where the
rebel kid and Honda’s son bond and share strips of celluloid and watch films in
an old cinema. This cinema nods to the black-and-white film footage seen at the
opening credits - which also casts a satirical light on all these replicants as
just an extension of all that nonsense. Of course, this reference to
celluloid dates this immensely in a digital age. This short-lived kidnapping triggers the
revelation that Officer Honda is also an android, although he was unaware.
Wu, it seems, has reprogrammed the battle androids of the
apocalyptic war, apparently making the world to his liking. Wu wears a shirt
splashed with pink (faded blood?), dislikes breeding, acts a little slimy around
his sax-playing catamite. ‘Final’ is
homophobic in the same way that the first ‘DOA’
is misogynistic: it surely is guilty of that in some way, but as with all Miike
there seems to be much more at play than meanness and such negativity does not
strike as the agenda. It’s all grist-for-the-mill for Miike’s anything-goes mentality.
Perversely, we are not going to find nuance in Dictator Wu as a predatory gay
madman, but we might find a little nuance in Ryô’s and Honda’s experiences of
being androids; and the homophobia is turned inside-out when – in a further
satirical take on ‘Tetsuo’ (which was
a coming-out film all of its own) – our two leads have a showdown. They have a
decent little melee and then, heading for that outrageous ending, they merge
into a crazy phallic robot which seems to satirise not only the homocentric nature
of gangster and fighting genres, but also the fetishising of mutation and
technology of the anime genre. Miike seems to care not at the ridiculous
conclusion: it nods to the old film footage but also to the previous conclusions
of the ‘DOA’ films and the appearance
of the cosmos throughout the series. And then it’s as if the previous
outrageousness turns throughout the series makes some sense if they were always
just replicants… or something.
It certainly explains their sudden powers at the end of ‘DOA’ and the seeming cyborg duck castration
in the childrens’ play during ‘Birds’
(yes, you read that correctly). The two leads melding together to make a
phallic robot, seeming to then recall their roles in the previous films,
certainly brings front-and-centre the homoerotic undertows of the first
instalments. It’s audacious, ridiculous, nonsensical, funny and shows that the
homophobia surrounding Wu shouldn’t be trusted and certainly isn’t the whole
story. The silliness of the machismo of the action genre has surely been a
prime target throughout the series.
‘Final’ is so
different and undoubtedly the lesser work, but when taken as a whole, its go-nowhere
story with a sudden outrageous finale is totally in keeping with the series as
a whole. It is eccentric and fascinating. The downbeat turn of the drama is
only obscured because there is the sudden mania of the denouement which feels
stuck on. But even the scrappy nature of the narrative seems to point that
Miike isn’t interested in filler and of the wealth of ideas crashing and
splashing into one another. Even if the
whole series is ultimately some kind of cyborg dream of past lives, or
something, then that is what we will go along with.
^^^
Miike has used the same two characters and put them in
three different 'DOA' scenarios like they are reincarnations, different models
of the same character throughout time and genre. Rikki is often unintentionally
laughable with his macho-posing. Shô is the more playful and flexible performer
and manages to reach genuine character and pathos amidst the absurdities.
The flaws are obvious: haphazard pacing and revelations just
come out of nowhere for example. Some may find this confusing; others may just see it as
cutting out the extraneous stuff and allowing the audience to piece things
together. It’s no surprise in interviews with Shô and Rikki that they both
convey that there was a sense of improvisation when working on ‘Dead or Alive’. Such scattershot
plotting ordinarily doesn’t convince me in a lot of Eastern cinema, but Miike’s
sense of the chaotic seems to me to be so aligned with deconstructing genre
tropes in the name of anarchic film-making that it works. It also means
that it is usually on second watches that I truly determine what I feel. For
example, initially I enjoyed ‘Birds’
the most, but on repeat watch I think equally highly of ‘DOA’ and I was more open to the merits of ‘Final’. They all centre on outsiders trying to do best for whatever
family units they have, all contain sentiment and the ludicrous, the inspired
and unruly, violence and melancholy to create a series that is frequently
brilliant, silly and riveting in equal measure. Often all at once.
The use of bildungsroman to lay out the pitiless nature of poverty is a well-established agenda and it proves no less effective here. As typical of this genre, the visuals are drab and drained, the aesthetic deceptively straightforward and unflashy. Perhaps you might be appalled at the poverty portrayed. There is little dialogue and music to provide respite. It looks and feels like something that could have been filmed anytime over the past several decades. Rusudan Pirveli’s direction keeps Avtandil Tetradze as Susa central at all times and is rewarded with an unflashy performance that, through context and slight expression, show his vulnerability, intelligence, sadness, resolve, and fleeting moments of enjoyment. It avoids the cliché of giving Susa a bad homelife – everyone is caught up in this punishing poverty – and his futile final expression of anger won’t mean a thing. This is how it is right now and it is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. That it comes in at 75 minutes means its sparse nature is direct without outstaying its welcome as a piece of empathising miserablism. Where the bulk of mainstream cinema offers up trite and persistent messages of hope, films such as ‘Susa’ are there for those who find those messages leave broken hearts and spirits.
