A Japanese movie, on just before midnight last night, directed by one 'Sabu'. Starts off with a man waking up in a hotel, dressed in a dark suit; it's Monday morning and he's unable to remember anything of his weekend. In a series of flashbacks, the sequence of events gradually comes back to him...so far, so generic.
Except that it's really not generic at all. The first flashback sets the tone - showing a small wake, eight guests plus mother and sister of the deceased (who is in a coffin at the front of the room), all dressed in dark suits, it's excruciatingly uncomfortable and increasingly surreal and hilarious, beginning with the stilted conversation amongst the kneeling participants, followed by the phone call from the doctor informing them that the deceased's pacemaker is still on and must be turned off before cremation lest the body explode, and culminating in the opening of his body to cut the wire, along with the high tension attendant upon the question of which wire to cut (they're both red!). It's deadpan and absurd and I squirmed and laughed all the way through.
To be honest, that's probably the high point as far as individual sequences go, but the film doesn't flag much from there on in, becoming positively Kafkaesque as the salaryman whose trajectory we follow drifts into a murky, increasingly bizarre nocturnal underworld - and really, really funny (the scene in the toilet, say, or the way in which he holds the yakuza and women hostage with forced laughter).
Then, about two-thirds of the way in, comes the revelation, and suddenly Monday shifts into 'message' mode, only the message is distinctly muddled. It has something to say about guns, and alcoholism, and state power, and the responsibility of the individual (and why does he have those fits of uncontrollable laughter? To be honest, I could empathise with them a little bit...), but I'm not sure exactly what. I'm inclined to think that its message is anti-gun - at least, that's what seems to be coming through in the extended probably-fantasy sequence which almost closes the film. But the ridiculousness of the way in which everyone divests themselves of their guns and celebrates suggests that Sabu may actually be satirising the mindset that sees an easy fix in just doing away with guns (and all that they stand for). But that in turn appears to be flipped on its head by the way in which the central protagonist (I can't remember his name) then meets his demise.
I suppose that to some extent it depends on how you read the devil-figure and the effect of the alcoholism, and their relationship to the main character. He blames both the devil and the gun, rather than himself, suggesting that the drunkenness allowed the devil to get inside him. If we perceive him sympathetically and take this to be accurate, then the film seems more open to an 'anti-gun' reading - some things are out of our control and we should not surround ourselves with the means of facilitating destruction when those forces take us over. But such a reading is rendered a bit problematic by his alcoholism, for surely this is something for which some moral blame must accrue to him, and for which he must take some responsibility? (A further layer is the 'coercive power of the state'/justice issue which comes up.)
The very final scene is kind of annoying, but it was always on the cards, I guess - it's rendered extra ambiguous by the suggestion it brings that this is a moment of choice.
So, pretty strange. But in a good way.
