The world is full of strange things, according to the canine hero of of Joe Odagiri’s surreal comedy. GOSH!! (THE オリバーな犬、(Gosh!!) このヤロウ MOVIE, THE Oliver na Inu, (Gosh!!) Kono Yaro MOVIE) Edited down from a TV series, the film takes place in a kind of Lynchian dream space in which once can embrace one’s inner desires, while in the ostensibly “normal”, everyday world, Odagiri himself stars as a foul-mouthed, lecherous police dog burdened by the legacy of his legendary father whose disappearance remains unsolved.
In another way, perhaps Oliver’s animalistic antics are a mirror for his handler Aoba’s (Sosuke Ikematsu) repressed desires or rebellion against his straight-laced personality. Describing himself as someone with a strong sense of justice, Aoba’s initial attempts to find his feet as an ordinary street cop were hamstrung by his clumsiness. He became a police dog handler hoping to find the perfect partner with whom he could find the “firmest trust,” only to be saddled with Oliver. Nevertheless, his ability to see him as a middle-aged deadbeat in a dog suit he can converse with in human language suggests a kind of synchronicity between dog and handler as is later praised by trainer Hagoromo (Eri Fukatsu).
The disappearance of Oliver’s father Rudolph, however, is one of the film’s central mysteries and linked with that of “Super Volunteer” Konishi (Koichi Sato) who has gone missing while looking for missing persons. Konishi seems to have been a regular salaryman before being struck by some kind of cosmic force that linked him with Rudolph and causes him to occasionally behave like a dog, in contrast to Oliver’s behaving like a human. He also ends up lost in a kind of other world with Rudolph’s former handler Mizoguchi (Masatoshi Nagase) who has become a freelance reporter and is recruited by his niece to investigate a sighting of a “little old man fairy” a boy she runs into is trying to catch.
Each of these incidents is linked by the sound of glass smashing which echoes that in the Red Room-like cabaret of the dream space and acts as a means of breaking the spell. Playing out as a series of surreal episodes connected by the presence of strange red doors leading to other worlds, there is a definite blurring of the real world and that of dreams along with a meta dimension that allows those trapped within it to question their reality. A policewoman (Kumiko Aso) wonders why the whole room suddenly embarked on an elaborate dance routine when she arrived to confront her father but has no real answer, abruptly returning to a more concrete reality.
Her father, meanwhile, had wanted to share a part of himself hitherto hidden from her that we later see fulfilled in the dream space. While this dream world appears to be somewhere that repressed desires are fulfilled, it seems that it may not have a wholly positive effect and as Oliver warns us at the film’s conclusion, there may be some doors that are best left closed. Nevertheless, making several homages to David Lynch including the discovery of a severed ear, Odagiri conjures an atmosphere of strangeness and mystery that goes beyond the weirdness of humanoid of dogs and alternate realities in which everything is the same but everyone is obsessed with takoyaki.
To that extent, Aoba becomes a kind of straight man frustrated by all this weirdness but unable to restore order to the world around him or accept the parts of himself that Oliver reflects. In his opening interview, he refuses to accept his fate, disrupting the interviewer’s questions by stating that he does not believe that his destiny is to be a dog handler, not because he is being modest about his abilities, but fundamentally because he resents his present reality and thinks he deserves better than being shackled to Oliver. There is, however, more to this world than we can fully understand with its various absurdities in which everything is strangely connected and “distortions in spacetime” can have profound effects on us all. Though some of its obscurity may stem from the film’s TV series origins with several seemingly pivotal characters appearing only for a few moments, there is a genuine sense of mystery and unease to be found within the noirish world that exists beyond a door some may wish they had never opened.
Gosh!! screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 