A Wrong Movie for the Wrong Times
Movie: Ichi the Killer
Dir: Takashi Miike
Ichi the Killer is devoid of any of the morals that we are conditioned to watch in movies and is regressively violent all through its length. Takashi Miike is in for a two hour long self-indulgent exploratory trip on the nuances of human violence, and the fact that he doesn’t care at all, brings forth a sense of awful disgust in the mind of an ordinary film goer(that includes me) all through the film.
The film begins with Ichi, an insecure young man playing the peeping tom on the balcony of a couple. Ichi is gaining pleasure out of the man's act of thrashing up his girlfriend’s face, which consequently makes him to jerk off vigorously and end up ejaculating himself on a potted plant. The title of the film strangely emerges from the puddle of semen that dripped fresh off the plant. What ensues is an aesthetically catchy and merciless gore-fest to which every single character of the film falls pray to.
Miike's dystopia is designed on Hideo Yamamoto's manga comic book, and hence the story of the film is largely insignificant as compared to the etching of the individual characters that seems to be the film’s ambition in most parts. One can't argue about the film’s act of trivialising rape and torture, as all means of violence are trivialised here, sometimes to the extend that one can’t decide whether he’s in for a comedy or a horror flick. From self-destructive acts of slicing one's own tongue, and enjoying the act of welcoming pain on oneself as a source of pleasure, the film deciphers the deepest of manly insecurities in all its rawness. Unlike Miike's terrifically conceived horror drama Audition (that in parts, reminded me of Aashiq Abu's 22 Female Kottayam), that went on from being a trivial relationship drama in the start to a gut-wrenchingly vengeful gore-fest towards the end, Ichi the Killer is amoral and tastelessly ( or is it an attempt to subvert the popular and accepted notion of taste) elegant from its very beginning.
Ichi is a victim and a victimizer at the same time: he's a product of his mentor Jijii's manipulative acts of persuation, that tweaked his memory into believing certain things that didn’t happen in his life. Jijii convinces him that his(Ichi's) reason for not saving her schoolmate from being raped is because he himself wanted to rape her. This story plays a crucial role in making Ichi what he is, as it is because of this that he is suppressing his desires which eventually prompts him to project it on others in the form of violence. This is evident from the innocent and satiating grin he puts on his face when he’s in for a kill.
Ichi the Killer is a work imbued in supreme male gaze, and in a world that is designed by the men for themselves, it’s not so surprising to see the characters behaving in this fashion. And it might bring forth the moralist in the viewer's mind to reflect on why the men are so foolishly insecure and unaware of themselves. For instance almost all the characters in the movie are flawed; Kakihara, the arch nemesis of Ichi-- who is in fact a rather confident version of Ichi himself-- too is fraught with foolishness for being overly fascinated with sadomasochism and gaining pleasure from self-destruction. Jijii is manipulative, while most of the other characters are either too sure about what they must do or unsure of themselves.
In the end, the movie is a tale of revenge—Jijii’s vengeance for Kakihara, Ichi's anger towards the people who bullied him(although it was Jijii playing with his head), the kid Takeshi's love- turned-hate relationship with Ichi—and a world devoid of softer feelings.
Apart from all the gore, a crow that appears intermittently in the movie is my favourite bit of the film. Is it an omniscient crow with a bird’s eye view like the one in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore or just a messenger of bad fate?
Hate him or like him, there are only a few like him who makes films that are unapologetically original.
Content advisory: The movie shows extreme acts of violence.
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