Writer: Ezekiel Lee Zhiang Yang

Writer Ratings:
Overall:
Cast:
Plot:
Effects:
Cinematography:

Watch this if you liked: "Gozu", "Nightmare Detective", "Audition"

It's always fairly difficult to review a Takashi Miike film, not purely because they're so damned warped and surreal, but because it's not always clear whether or not he's just having a laugh at the commercial cinema-goers. With some 70 films under his belt about lactating cow-women, sadomasochist yakuzas and demented mascot people (and these are only the ones I've watched), I feel obliged to volunteer this to the uninitiated - you'll think that Takashi Miike is insane.

More experience with art house cinema would help fill in some blanks but Miike never makes his films accessible in the first place. Extremist in the true sense of the word, Miike films outrage even Western censorship boards so it's shocking to learn that a Miike film can play at a Malaysian screen. What can one expect, if we already know that metaphor-heavy plot devices are sure to suffer the cut, possibly rendering the entire film incomprehensible?

Thankfully the cuts don't appear fatal to the story but telling you the skinny, as the synopsis above did, is not the point of the film at all - not at the very least. Like any counter-commercial, cult-intended film, you'll feel downright cheated if you walked into the cinema expecting the movie from the synopsis. A useful summary is that two men called Jun and Shiro (Ryuhei Matsuda and Masanobu Ando, last seen by Malaysians in the equally befuddling "Nightmare Detective") wind up in a pseudo-futuristic prison like that in Lars von Trier's chalk-drawn "Dogville". In this minimalist hell, we are taken through the mad visual stylings of Miike's mind, where issues as diverse as religion, science, existentialism and the nature-versus-nature debate are discussed intensely behind the backdrop of a murder investigation.

Miike's cinematic arrogance kowtows to no poor confused viewer but he does go some way to make things clearer in this effort by repeating certain scenes to paint context. For example, when Jun and Shiro laments over death and the afterlife, their fate is visualised by a space rocket and the Pyramids - one representing Space and the other, Heaven. Knowing the academic discussion behind distinguishing these two will build bridges towards making you a Miike fan.

Sadly, I've crossed them too many times to return empty-handed. While the surrealism and homo-erotica are rich and guaranteed, I'm not always certain that every scene is necessary for the effort or if a real answer to the dilemma was substantially offered to the viewer. While I'm not confident enough to dismiss the experience of watching this film as indulgent mental masturbation by the director, Miike doesn't seem to have gotten the best out of Matsuda and Ando as actors either.

Unwittingly corrupted when its production house listed the movie under selective alphabet heading (the original intention was the more sensible "A Big Bang Love: Juvenile"), the native Japanese title for this movie however stands as "4.6 billion years of love" - an obvious reference to the estimated age of planet Earth and a not-so-obvious allusion to the theme of existentialism as a philosophy. With such messy takes on just its title, the movie is just as challenging as reading the Big Bang Theory. Miike is either too crazy or too clever for most of us - but this time, one shouldn't care too much about which to conclude.

Cinema Online, 23 September 2008