"Gozu" (2003)

(Originally released as Gokudo Kyofu Dai-gekijo: Gozu)

Starring: Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino, Shohei Hino, Keiko Tomita, Harumi Sone

First, the lowdown: A yakuza member takes his brother to Nagoya to kill him, and then it gets weird.

This is gonna be a hard one for me to write. Throughout the movie I started to see quite a few David Lynch-like parallels: small industrial town setting, outsider wandering around in bewilderment, sex that isn’t sexy, violence that isn’t violent, and layer after layer of ambiguity. In fact summing this movie is like summing up Blue Velvet. True you can give a rough sketch, but you still miss on many of the oddities that are presented in this movie with a basic review. But here goes.

Minami and Ozaki are brothers who’ve been working with the Azamawari crew for years. Minami loves his older brother very much, but Ozaki is nuts. As in mondo batshit insane. At a crew meeting, Ozaki makes a comment about a tiny lapdog outside being trained to kill Yakuza. Before anyone has the opportunity to refute this claim, Ozaki strides outside and dashes the animal on the sidewalk, shocking everyone. (Then again, having been around too many ill-mannered, constantly barking, little rodents that pretend to be dogs, I can’t hardly blame him.)

The Chairman doesn’t approve of that flavor of crazy, so he orders Minami to take his brother to Nagoya, on the pretense that they’re checking up on a crew there. In reality, Minami is supposed to kill his brother when they arrive in Nagoya and take him to a “disposal yard” that the Chairman controls.

On route, Ozaki orders Minami to stop the car so that they can take out the vehicle behind them that’s also been trained to kill Yakuza. Minami recognizes this as yet another one of Ozaki’s fugues and stops him from shooting the driver of the other car by knocking Ozaki out.

Upon arrival in Nagoya, however, Minami finds out that his brother has died some time during the trip. Not knowing what to do, Minami pulls into a restaurant to collect himself. After making a brief break in the restaurant (don’t order the chicken custard), Minami looks outside and sees that his brother’s body has disappeared. So after enlisting in the help of a man with a pigment disorder (which makes him look like a member of the Mummenschantz), Minami goes on a frantic search for his brother’s dead, but very mobile body.

That’s all I can really sum up and it doesn’t even scrape the surface of the oddness of this film. While I am gaining a like of Takashi Miike’s work, there’s so much to this movie that feels like a first effort. The movie is ambiguous, REALLY AMBIGUOUS. I haven’t seen so much tense vagueness in a film since Twin Peaks. All this movie needed was a backwards talking midget and we’d be set.

Line of the movie: “Those who serve milk are healthier than those who drink it.” You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.

Three and a half stars. Not a significant source of calcium.