The major works of filmmaker Takashi Miike, “Audition” (1999) and “Ichi The Killer” (2001), are proclamations of a filmmaker with a shameless thirst for style. On the surface, these films are about violence, but once the blood is skimmed off the veneer, a froth of psychosexual power dynamics bubbles its way to the top. Perhaps our most animal behavior coupled with our most human, Miike crochets sex and fashion with masterful finesse, elevating his worlds and his thesis with undeniable attitude.
However, these mainstay pieces of his filmography are as disparate as they come, with the former shot bare in the office buildings and side streets of Japan. Stable camerawork, long shots, and slow pacing lure us in with quietude and near-meekness, much like its lead femme fatale, Asami. Meanwhile, “Ichi The Killer”’s vivid world is flashy, fast, and voguish, much in the spirit of the comic book from which it was adapted, with boss Kakihara most often footing the bill.
Yet despite the dissimilarity of the worlds crafted, Miike is interested in the authorities of sex, and clenches his costuming in firm hands to enforce it. In “Audition,” Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a father and widower, feels at first pressured, and then liberated, by the proposition that it’s time for him to find a new wife. Working in the entertainment industry, he leverages his position to host a fake audition to find a girlfriend who specifically matches his qualifications. He’s disinterested in all but one, the young, beautiful, pristine Asami (Eihi Shiina), a former ballerina. Despite her ideal, literal resume, Asami harbors a darkness of which Aoyama could never begin to anticipate.
Aoyama is dressed as a prototypical default masculine figure. We know him for his roles: father, worker, seeker. His presence is vague: not shy, but simply unremarkable. Costume designer Tomoe Kumagai dresses him clean and inoffensively. He is clearly a man who comes from enough means to maintain the structured suit sets he dons, but the impression is that he coordinates primarily for function. Between his polos, suits, and trousers, patterns (even slight) are nowhere to be found amidst the weavings of grey, brown, white, and black. He dresses plainly but smartly, seemingly melting into the architecture around him. Whether it’s his office, home, or the streets of Japan, he becomes one with them: the culture’s patriarchal everyman.
Aoyama’s practical romantic desires match his wardrobe’s aesthetics: he wants the kind of smart, “mature” woman with achievements who looks good on paper. But in his selection of Asami, he chooses a woman counter to his requirements. Purely motivated at first by her photograph in a stack of dozens – her gentle face on a white backdrop, somehow whiter than the paper itself, with a white tank and cardigan to clothe her—his interest deepens on account of her essay, chronicling her forfeiture of ballet as a result of an injury. All the while, the factor of her youth becomes hard to ignore.
Miike furthers the tension of her youth by artfully leaning into Aoyoma’s fantasy. As we watch Aoyama’s eyes scan Asami’s photo and dart across her essay, with a held-breath yearning, his pristine ballerina ideal provokes implied costuming: form-fitting leotards, pink nylon, tutus, and ribbon. These elements are inherent to the craft, but intentionally inspire peak playful girlishness: a perfect femininity.
Yet concurrently, Miike’s camera constantly captures her from behind, both protecting her from our gaze as well as sharpening our view of the animal of her: the cutting jut of her spine beneath the pale, delicate skin of her back. Her black hair hangs heavily over her shoulders, with a feminine cascade that proclaims not just the contrast of her beauty, but also, as it moves, falling like molasses over her body’s structure, her primality. But with her modest, coquettish presentation consisting of a coterie of textures and fabrics that are near-always white, we’re thrust into an ease that is somehow made vigilant by its own insistence on itself.
Miike smartly intensifies Aoyama’s fantasies when Aoyoma and Asami meet for the first time during her audition. Asami wears an over-the-knee-length white skirt, a white cardigan, a white tank, and white kitten heels. Nothing baggy nor tight, though nothing feels particularly tailored. Her clothes just kind of exist. She sits calmly but rigidly, with her heels together and hands on her lap, taking up no more space than the structure of her compacted body. Virginal quality is at the fore. The blank slate-ness of it all is perpetuated, leaving her ripe for whatever inclinations and expectations Aoyama inks onto her page. Already, the modesty of it all echoes with imbalanced sexual tension on account of how pervasive his want is. He asks her nothing more than what he already knows from her essay, and the desire is decided with no new citations needed.
At the insistence of his boss, who believes the ghostly cobwebs of her so-called life should eliminate her candidacy, Aoyama reluctantly pauses his pursuit. Days pass in silence, and Asami sits in her living room beside the phone and a rustling body bag. When Aoyama can’t get her out of his mind, he finally calls, and she picks up only after calculating the number of rings that feel most natural to let pass. He wants to go for lunch.
And so, Asami struts down the road in an ostentatious, fabulous cherry red trench coat with fur trim that billows in the wind. In accordance with what we previously knew about Asami, this coat seems incredibly out of place. The boldness of it is a bellowing holler made louder by the context of her previous silences. It feels like an indiscretion. What it is, though, is a reinvigoration: her knowing re-entry into the cat-and-mouse game. Authority has been restored, and the coat itself is a signifier that there’s a side to her – a power and assertiveness she possesses, or even a sinister quality – that’s starting to come into focus.
This sudden change in shell begs a question. For us, it’s become clear that there’s a facade at play, but this chicanery is outside of Aoyama’s gaze: the secrecy of the body bag and the vision of her in the red coat remain contained. Aoyama is a pawn in a puppetted game. At lunch, the coat sits idly beside her, tucked and folded beneath the tabletop and out of sight. It’s just beneath the surface, and like everything else, represents what Aoyama allows himself to see; the cost of his fickle curiosity.
Continued, every time they are together, Asami wears variations of an all white ensemble in delicate fabrics, chaste and vaguely bridal in silhouette. At dinner, a white blouse with chantilly lace; at their hotel getaway, a white satin shin-length dress. Yet, as the film unravels, and we catch glimpses of Asami’s brutal underbelly, the relationship between pursuer and subject comes to a subversive head in her final confrontation with Aoyama.
She’s made him promise to love only her. She’s revealed the dark scars that mar her upper thighs, territory of a lover, and they finally have sex. Waking up to an empty bed, the next time Aoyama will see her is after this veil of purity has dissolved – when she stands above his quasiconscious body with a syringe in her hand and his manipulations on her mind.
In this moment, where Asami truly flexes her ineffable power, no longer an object of lustful mystique, she has become a canvas for womanly silhouettes combined with hardened, resilient fabrics. Over top of a typical white outfit is a black leather apron with brown rubber straps and a pair of gloves to match. She’s become some surgeon-butcher hybrid, but still maintains an undeniable femininity. The brown straps that wrap her waist cinch in her figure more than anything else she’s worn, and if not for the material, her gloves would be mistaken for opera apparel. Rubber and leather— durable, tough, and resistant—are utilized in a defensive brutality. In her series of torturous acts, she punishes her own objectification: a reclamation of her power worn girlishly and brutally atop her alabaster mask.
A much different film, “Ichi The Killer,” titled not after the main protagonist, but instead the elusive object of his fantasy. Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano) is a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer who, in search of his missing boss, Anjo, finds his world has been invaded by a psychotic killer. This killer leaves behind unfathomably brutal scenes that turn carnage into weather – blood drizzling from ceilings, floors rendered into flash floods of entrails, and bodies bisected like trees in a storm. And so, a lustful masochist in pursuit of perfect violence, Kakihara endeavors to find the man behind the carnage: the mysterious Ichi (Sakichi Sato).
“Ichi the Killer” starts with a nasty bass line and a kinetic montage of technicolor Tokyo. We race through the neon-lit streets before being dropped into a room of suits: yakuza. In opposition to Aoyama’s everyman, this room of enforcers is filled with the masculine ideal, dressed in flurries of pinstripe suits, strong shoulders, and elegant jacquard fabrics. They’re stylish subjects of wealth, a sea of expected man-ness: the anticipated vision of a yakuza gang.
The first time we see Kakihara, it’s in a hero shot from behind, and unlike the traditional macho of those around him, he’s wearing a brown leather pant and jacket set with flashy red zippers and a red button-down shirt beneath. Immediately, we know he’s singular, but even still, this is an introductory piece to his difference, and the most understated outfit he wears in the whole film. Kakihara defies expectation: frivolous, flamboyant, and subversive, he cruises the streets in jewel tones and laces, sequins and fanciful scarves, blowing smoke, with expert cool, out of the self-made slits in his cheeks. His suaveness is almost funny, and his androgynous, out-loud expression declares both his power and his flippance to convention. Costume designer Michiko Kitamura’s effeminate take on the ensembles of a most-violent higher up in the yakuza brings a contrast that already hints at sexual juxtapositions at play.
However, Ichi’s contrast is not one of androgynous sadomasochism but of sanity and unreality; meekness and power. When Ichi is lucid, he’s a victim. In the aftermath of his crimes, we see him in white t-shirts and underwear, cowering in his room like a little boy. At work, where he is berated by a peer, he wears a white dress shirt and bowtie, a costume of traditional, elevated masculinity that renders him even more infantile in contrast. But the in-between stages of sane and not, those in which he’s vulnerable to be swayed to massacre, it’s always a dark hoodie: incognito and shrouding, a consequential symbol of his temptations.
Kakihara is always tempted, and the diversity of his wardrobe shows just how much he wears it on his sleeve. Whether manning a torture session in a full red plaid suit or offering his tongue as penance in a shimmering purple trench with a silk chartreuse neck scarf, he is always balancing hard and soft, light and dark, feminine and masculine. He’s queerness embodied. Identifying boss Anjo’s death by the taste of his blood, we come to find that Kakihara is in love with him not on account of romance, but on account of the violence he inflicts.
When Kakihara’s recusancy leads him to commandeer the Anjo syndicate, he does so easily on account of how much he’s feared. Despite their attempt to oust him, he saunters down the streets of Tokyo with his henchmen in a ruffled, striped pink and purple silk set, accompanied by a long, draping cranberry-colored overcoat: dressing in femininity while enforcing patriarchal power by leading a coup. Kakihara revels in his own violence, but yearns to be an ultimate victim, even if it means he faces perfect violence as a means of death. When we see him on the receiving end of assault, it’s always his choice. His flexibility and agility in moving through a world of pain and hurt grant him the no-fucks-given essential sexuality of his clothing.
Conversely, Ichi’s wardrobe is marked by dualism and indecision. He is a sadist by means of psychosis and hypnotism, undeniably a perpetrator, but also a pawn, neither on account of willingness. The all-black power jumpsuit he wears when killing is an echo of hardened dominance with a hint of pity. He always maintains his boyishness even when he’s the most formidable person in the room. It’s padded where muscles ought to be, and the plastered yellow “1” on the turtleshell back reads as a pathetic trophy given to oneself: a reminder to feel big and strong. Despite the validity of Ichi’s power, his uniform is a facade of confidence.
In their final confrontation, on the roof of the apartment building, their dualism is firmly set. Kakihara wears his most effeminate outfit, an iridescent purple-turquoise shifting suit with a sequinned lace shirt underneath. His appearance is stacked against Ichi’s trademark suit, a brawny caricature of animalism and power. Nevertheless, their whole relationship is one of subversion. The dom is masochist and the sub the sadist: Kakihara is pursuing a fight that Ichi doesn’t want. He chases him around the rooftop begging, but still is the pursuer, the one with something to gain. Yet when Ichi’s emotions shoulder him from the fight, the film concludes with Kakihara in his sex dungeon, shirtless, cowering in the corner of an all-blue frame. A sadness, vulnerability, and submission we had yet to see showcased by the sparsest wardrobe of all: skin.
Takashi Miike’s films are tales of power, sex, and desire existing in extremely violent worlds you’d be frightened to witness under a black light. And still, despite the disgust that lies in its gorefest medium, Miike’s approach to each of his stories utilizes a dextrous hand that crafts fashion to not only enforce the style of his worlds but enhance the statements on the themes that bind them. Asami weaponized sheep’s clothing and the male gaze to a frightful end, and Kakihara’s power came from his shamelessness. Neither of these protagonists got what they wanted, but Miike, in partnership with his costume designers, made their desires apparent.
In “Audition,” Miike managed to lull us into a daydream by fixing his camera on a beautiful young woman with delicate features. In “Ichi the Killer,” a yakuza enforcer defies expectations: parading on the surface instead of flying under the radar; his hunger for violence assuaged by being on the receiving end. Miike’s touch is not a gentle one, and the sexuality of his films is equally kinky, but in crafting his characters, he’s always subverting the dom and sub agenda. Whether stripping bare “Audition”’s attire or leveraging florid ensembles in “Ichi the Killer,” Miike investigates the propulsive gaze of desire: how the lure of sex is inevitably worn on the sleeve.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Sex and Threads: The Major Works of Takashi Miike )
Also on site :