Tag: Takahiro Murase

Gemini (双生児 GEMINI, Shinya Tsukamoto, 1999)

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Shinya Tsukamoto made his name as a punk provocateur with a series of visually arresting, experimental indie films set to a pounding industrial score and imbued with Bubble-era urban anxiety. Inspired by an Edogawa Rampo short story, 1999’s Gemini (双生児 GEMINI, Soseiji Gemini) is something of a stylistic departure from the frenetic cyberpunk energy of his earlier career, marked as much by stillness as by movement in its strikingly beautiful classical composition and intense color play. Like much of his work, however, Gemini is very much a tale of societal corruption and a man who struggles against himself, unable to resist the social codes which were handed down to him while simultaneously knowing that they are morally wrong and offend his sense of humanity. 

Yukio (Masahiro Motoki) is a war hero, decorated for his service as a battlefield medic saving the life of a prominent general during the first Sino-Japanese War. He’s since come home and taken over the family business where his fame seems to have half the well-to-do residents of the area inventing spurious excuses to visit his practice, at least according to one little boy whose mum has brought him in with a bump on the head after being beset by kids from the slums. “They’re just like that from birth” Yukio later tells his wife echoing his authoritarian father, “the whole place should be burned to the ground”. A literal plague is spreading, but for Yukio the slums are a source of deadly societal corruption that presents an existential threat to his way of life, primed to infect with crime and inequity. His home, which houses his practice, is hermetically sealed from those sorts of people but lately he’s begun to feel uneasy in it. There’s a nostalgia, a sadness, a shadowy presence, not to mention a fetid stench of decay which indicates an infection has already taken place, the perimeter has been penetrated. 

The shadowy presence turns out to belong to his double, Sutekichi whose name literally means “abandoned fortune”, a twin exposed at birth as unworthy of the family name owing to his imperfection in the form of a snake-like birthmark on his leg and raised by a travelling player in the slums. Having become aware of his lineage, Sutekichi has returned to make war on the old order in the form of the parents who so callously condemned him to death, engineering their demise and then pushing Yukio into a disused well with the intention of stealing his identity which comes with the added bonus that Yukio’s wife, Rin (Ryo), was once his. 

Rin’s presence had already presented a point of conflict in the household, viewed with contempt and suspicion by Yukio’s mother because of her supposed amnesia brought on by a fire which destroyed her home and family. Yukio had reassured her that “you can judge a person by their clothes”, insisting that Rin is one of them, a member of the entrenched upper-middle class which finds itself in a perilous position in the society of late Meiji in which the samurai have fallen but the new order has not quite arrived. In Rin modernity has already entered the house, a slum dweller among them bringing with her not crime and disease but a freeing from traditional austerity. In opposing his parents’ will and convincing them to permit his marriage, Yukio has already signalled his motion towards the new but struggles to free himself from the oppressive thought of his father. He confesses that as a battlefield physician he doubted himself, wondering if it might not have been kinder to simply ease the suffering of those who could not be saved while his father reminds him that the German medical philosophy in which he has been trained insists that you must continue treatment to the very last. 

This is the internal struggle Yukio continues to face between human compassion and the obligation to obey the accepted order which includes his father’s feelings on the inherent corruption of the slum dwellers which leads him to deny them his medical knowledge which he perhaps thinks should belong to all. The dilemma is brought home to him one night when a young woman is found violently pounding on his door wanting help for her sickly baby, but just as he makes up his mind to admit her, putting on his plague suit, a messenger arrives exclaiming that the mayor has impaled himself on something after having too much to drink. Yukio treats the mayor and tells his nurses to shoo the woman away, an action which brings him into conflict with the more compassionate Rin who cannot believe he could be so cynical or heartless. 

Where Yukio is repressed kindness, a gentle soul struggling against himself, Sutekichi is passion and rage. Having taken over Yukio’s life, he takes to bed with Rin who laughs and asks him why it is he’s suddenly so amorous. She sees or thinks she sees through him, recognising Sutekichi for whose return she had been longing but also lamenting the absent Yukio who was at least soft with her in ways Sutekichi never was. “It’s a terrible world because people like you exist” Sutekichi is told by a man whose fiancée he robbed and killed. Yukio by contrast is unable to understand why this is happening to him, believing that he’s only ever tried to make people happy and has not done anything to merit being thrown in a well, failing to realise that his very position of privilege is itself oppressive, that he bears his parents’ sin in continuing to subscribe to their philosophy in insisting on their innate superiority to the slum dwellers who must be kept in their place so that they can continue to occupy theirs. 

Apart, both men are opposing destructive forces in excess austerity and violent passion, only through reintegration of the self can there be a viable future. Tsukamoto casts the austerity of the medical practice in a melancholy blue, contrasting with the fiery red of the post-apocalyptic slums, eventually finding a happy medium with the house bathed in sunshine and the family seemingly repaired as a doctor in a white suit prepares to minister to the poor. Having healed himself, he begins to heal his society, treating the plague of human indifference in resistance to the prevalent anxiety of the late Meiji society. 

Gemini is released on blu-ray in the UK on 2nd November courtesy of Third Window Films in a set which also includes a commentary by Tom Mes, making of featurette directed by Takashi Miike, behind the scenes, make up demonstration featurette, Venice Film Festival featurette, and original trailer.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Haze (ヘイズ, Shinya Tsukamoto, 2005)

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“Nothing spectacular is waiting for us even if we get out of here anyway” according to the imprisoned hero at the centre of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Haze (ヘイズ). Tsukamoto began his career with a series of tales of urban anxiety, a fear of increasing mechanisation which rendered a man mere slave to his physicality. Created as part of Jeonju International Film Festival’s digital project and later expanded to its current length, Haze skews in a slightly different direction, repurposing the director’s trademark body horror as a kind of depression metaphor as the unnamed hero, played by Tsukamoto himself, attempts to climb out of a pit of despair while experiencing momentary echoes of the traumatic event which has trapped him there. 

As the film opens, a man (Shinya Tsukamoto) wakes up in a confined space with no knowledge of how he got there or memories of his previous life. He convinces himself this must be a dream but believes if it were he would’t feel pain, which he later does not least from the gaping and unexplained wound near his hip. Left with no other choice, he crawls forward in search of an exit, gripping on literally by the skin of his teeth as he climbs through barbwire, beaten on the head by a strange contraption attacking him from what looks like an arrowslit in a castle. He glimpses other figures writhing in pain through a gap in the wall, some of whom are then torn apart while he later comes across great machines of human butchery and finds himself wading through severed limbs until he finally encounters another survivor, a woman (Kaori Fujii), who is minded to escape the way she believes she came in while the man is already beginning to give up on the idea of survival. 

The man meditates on what might have brought him here, as if it makes a difference or would help him to escape. He wonders if a war has broken out and he’s been taken prisoner, has been abducted by a weird cult, or is a plaything of a “rich pervert” enacting his own version of The Most Dangerous Game. He is perhaps crawling through hell, only one that may be of his making as a kind of metaphor for life’s battering as he pushes forward blindly, lacerating himself in pursuit of freedom while strangely indifferent to the suffering of others who appear not to have been so lucky. 

The woman is unable to provide any more explanation, lamenting that this may be their finally resting place but insisting that she is getting out. The man isn’t so sure, listening to her plan with scepticism, but once again wondering how he got here. Asked who is behind this the woman can only reply that it seems to be “a really big and dark thing, neither a human being nor a beast. You find yourself in total darkness being dismembered and floating in the water”. “If you see nothing ahead you eventually end up here” the man replies. After drifting off, the woman tells the man that she had a sensation of waking up alone somewhere dark and feeling lonely, “like falling into a place like this”. 

Later she remembers that she wanted to go somewhere, but was imprisoned here before she could run away. The man harps back on his theories again, wondering if it was a rich pervert after all, though this seems like a lot of bother to go to for sadistic kicks. He doesn’t stop to wonder what it was the woman wanted to escape, life itself or an intolerable situation and what the motives might be of the person who tried to stop her leaving. In fact, his own “sweet memory” is a bright and cheerful one of watching fireworks which he remembers liking a lot, though fireworks are perhaps also tiny sparks of life which blink out far too soon. Questioned about the motives of the hypothetical rich pervert, the woman suggests he might have done something like this to make her “go back” to wherever it was that she was desperate to leave. In any case, even if it’s back “there”, she is determined to escape and, perhaps paradoxically, gives the man the courage to follow though it’s he who eventually vows to “save” her. 

The path towards escape is itself a kind of rebirth, pushing through blood and viscera towards the light, the hazy dawn of the title. Something has perhaps been overcome if only in the brief moments of unconsciousness between life and death and perhaps because of that single “sweet memory”, unreliable and hazy as it might eventually prove.

Haze is available on blu-ray as part of Third Window Films’ Tsukamoto box set which also includes his latest film Killing and a new restoration of Adventures of Electric Rod Boy all of which are accompanied by audio commentaries by Tom Mes.