Audition | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Audition ***½

by Ed Gonzalez on September 9, 2001 Jump to Comments (2) or Add Your Own

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Audition is Takashi Miike's neo-Darwinian exercise in terror, playing out like a comfy companion piece to Shall We Dance? before evolving into a torturous freakshow not unlike Baise-moi. Miike devilishly sets up a discordant relationship between commerce and affection when a filmmaker, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), uses an audition as a way of finding love. His cohort, Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura), is concerned with the slump in the motion picture industry and advises Aoyama that only the fittest will survive: His deceased wife's replacement should be good but not necessarily talented. (For him, only good girls can be good wives while only talented girls can shoot a movie.) The audition is then seen as a bridge between fantasy and reality—a successful experiment (or so it seems), for Asami (Eihi Shiina) appears to embody Aoyama's every ideal. Asami makes Yashuhisa uneasy: She's gentle and graceful, but the package is "too easy." Miike's static long shots and symbolic use of color subversively recall Ozu, and the audition itself becomes, intentional or not, a studied take on stately naïvete. Audition's stylistic trapdoor, though, isn't as abrupt as many seem to suggest, because a shaking body bag and a troubled Asami (sitting by her phone waiting for Aoyama's delayed call) terrifyingly portend the chaos yet to come. Miike's torture mechanism is very much based on the premise that performance is crucial to the freeing of the soul, and just as Asami's rage is as much a product of Freudian psychosexual repression, so too does it express a need to negate her passivity. Audition's twists and turns fascinatingly blur the film's already hallucinogenic temporal rhythms. Though she isn't cast as the lead in Yashuhisa's now defunct film, Asami yearns to be an actress in real life. Hence the piano wire. The problem, of course, is that what is real is now a matter of opinion.

Director(s): Takashi Miike
Screenplay: Ryu Murakami
Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Jun Kunimura, Renji Ishibashi, Toshie Negishi, Ren Osugi, Miyuki Matsuda
Distributor: American Cinematheque
Runtime: 115 min.
Rating: NR
Year: 1999

Comments

franks149 on February 10, 2010, 07:26 PM

This movie is incredible. One of the few movies that makes me shut my eyes.

The most vicious romantic comedy ever.

No-Personality on June 30, 2010, 11:35 AM

Audition is funny? I'm always the last to know about these things, like Carrie being considered a black-comedy. I actually found this movie more romance and credible drama than horror, thrills, or comedy. (Most vicious? What about Dead Alive; Uncle Les was pretty nasty too)

Why bother judging it based on how vicious and visually excruciating it is? I think it's that kind of thing that's been responsible for the amount of hype (for example, something like) The Girl Next Door got when it first came out (oh wait...it still has a 7.0 rating at IMDb; *automatic eye-roll*). Need I even mention: Alexandre Aja's career or Eli Roth's Hostel (Part) II? I know I'm 5 months too late to be responding to your comment like this but I sat through Audition's needle, pin, and wire scene without so much as a blink (oh, and thank you SO MUCH Linda Marotta- I did not notice the first time I saw the movie that it was vomit in that bowl, now I have to gag every time I see it). And I hadn't watched these Saw's, Chaos's, and Captivity's before Audition. So I'm not sure it's being desensitized, maybe just that I don't exactly see what her physically torturing him had to do with the theme of loneliness (other than hacking off his feet so he could never run away).