| | Ranpo Jigoku (Rampo Noir, ¶Ã¨B¦aº»)
Director: Akio Jissoji, Atsushi Kaneko, Hisayasu Sato, Suguru Takeuchi (I really dunno who the hell they are)
Main Cast: Tadanobu Asano (²L³¥©¾«H)¡ARyuhei Matsuda (ªQ¥ÐÀs¥)¡A¦¨®c¼e¶Q
Year: 2005
The most surprising film in 30th HKIFF up till now, Rampo Jigoku (Rampo Noir) presents how a cult film should be in the 21st century. The film divides to four divisions by four chapters; four different styles of crazy yet merge together. It stuns you at that moment but lingers on your mind very long. Using very pop stars, popular music, otaku¡¦s comedy tell everyone that how a cult film, collective social sickness can be for everybody, it is no longer belongs to a ¡¥cult¡¦, a certain group with certain ¡¥mania¡¦, again.
Ranpo Jigoku would remind you so many cult classics in film history, also with very original, non-freudian, non-Bunuel or non-Hitchokian approaches on the subject these guys like: narcissism, voyeurism, animalism, sadism-masochism, fetishism, and necrophilia etc. The performance of ¦¨®c¼e¶Q is extremely outstanding. He casts in one story about magic mirrors made by himself which can kill women with unbelievable scientific explanations, such mirror can melt down the face by someone who indulges in gazing the mirror. He kills those women because while making sex with those women, he can see his own beauty from their faces. Yet he envies the mirror image of himself because he cannot be so perfectly beauty as in mirror images. Finally, he cruses in the glass of reflecting glass inside police station during inspection. This story re-interprets of traditional Japanese myth about mirrors, Greek myth of Narcissus, as well as the traditional flower ceremony of ¡¥narcissus¡¦, with the overwhelming use of mirrors in cinematography and mise-en-scene, such combination expands the horror of mirror has been established by Michael Powell¡¦s Peeping Tom and J-horror classic Ringu.
The third part of Rampo Jigoku also impresses me a lot. The existentialist story combines some elements of surreal classics The Woman in the Dunes, philosophy masterpiece Albert Camus¡¦s the Myth of Sisyphus and the very notorious Oshima¡¦s In the Realm of Senses. A veteran limbless soldier isolated on island by his wife. Neither dead nor alive, reversing the sexual dominance, he totally became a sexual pet by his wife.
To conclude how this film is? Or how the cult film in 21st century is? Using a tagline from traditional Japanese folklore: the mirror neither true, nor untrue. That truly cult film is.
Obscure Rating: 8/10
http://imdb.com/title/tt0423034/ |
