Asami Yamazaki

When a lonely middle-aged film producer, Shigeharu Aoyama, decides to audition potential wives under the guise of casting a new movie, he gets more than he bargained for in Takashi Miike's ground-breaking horror flick, AUDITION.

Before the auditions are held, Aoyama picks out the resume of Asami Yamazaki as his favourite. Of all the demure young girls smiling prettily for the camera, Asami is the one he likes best. Aoyama's confederate warns him that there is something not right about the girl, but after the auditions are held he maintains that she is the one for him. And he seems to be right.

Romance blooms between Aoyama and Asami, but the girl has a dark past and when she finds out that the Aoyama's auditions were a pretext to meet girls she not only takes it badly, she decides to wreak bloody vengeance upon him.

It's not the setup of this classic horror story that is remarkable, it's the execution at the hands of Miike and the actress Eihi Shiina. Miike discards most of the techniques of the slasher genre: there are no jumpcuts, no mysterious shadows, no claustrophobic tracking shots. Miike's camera (in this film) is very still, every shot is lovingly-lit and in-focus. He builds a terrifying atmosphere out of all of that stillness, silence and light. (Textbook example is the burlap sack in Asami's apartment. The sack lies in the foreground by the telephone for a long interval while nothing occurs. Then the phone rings and the sack lurches and screams--there's a man in it. Neither Asami nor Miike's camera react.)

The film is also remarkable for its sudden divergence into David Lynch-style surrealism. Once we understand a little about Asami's dark past the film cuts into a sequence of flashbacks and do-overs in which her past is revised in different ways, as is her relationship with Shigeharu. Is it a dream sequence? Who is the dreamer? There are any number of compelling reasons that Asami could have become what she did. She is somehow able to insinuate her story into the lives of her victims; actually winding her different versions of her own backstory into theirs; rewriting scenes that we have already seen, but always leading to the same conclusion. There is no escaping Asami Yamazaki.

J-Horror is not unique in popular culture say that it relishes the destruction of young girls. This is a staple of fiction in many other genres:suspense, thrillers, crime, mystery and even superhero narratives are filled to overflowing with abused girls, and AUDITION plays right into that. The varying levels of abuse Asami may or may not have suffered in the past have caused her to become this monster, but this film presents those scenarios with the same clear-eyed impassivity that it does every other sequence, rather than fetishizing it in the way of 'torture porn'. AUDITION is far more interested in the vengeance that Asami wreaks upon her (mostly male) victims than in what was done to her. With her ambiguous backstory, Asami can in many ways be seen to represent the vengeful spirit of all of those girls degraded and butchered in decades worth of cheap movies. Aoyama, the protagonist, is presented as pathetic and helpless in this film in a way that Asami never is.

That said, Miike denies that his films have 'messages' and I think it's important to take that into consideration: he is not necessarily criticizing those other movies.

But if all that isn't enough to convince you that Asami Yamazaki is a great villain, the final scene certainly will. Watching her chanting as she works on Aoyama with the wire saw is perhaps the squirmiest scene committed to celluloid. If you haven't seen the film, see it. If you have, I have only one thing left to say to you:

IKI IKI IKI

-- JF