Audition (1999 film)
Audition (オーディション, Ōdishon) is a 1999 horror film directed by Takashi Miike and adapted by Daisuke Tengan, based on the 1997 novel by Ryu Murakami. Starring Ryo Ishibashi and Eihi Shiina, the film is about a widower, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ishibashi), who stages a phony audition to meet a potential new romantic partner. After interviewing several women, Aoyama becomes interested in Asami (Shiina), whose dark past affects their relationship.
Audition was originally a project of the Japanese company Omega Project, who wanted to make a horror film after the massive financial success of their previous production Ring. The company purchased the rights to Murakami's book and sought Tengan and Miike for an adaptation. The cast and crew consisted primarily of previous Miike collaborators, with the exception of Shiina, who had worked as a model prior to her career in film. The film was shot in about three weeks in Tokyo.
Audition premiered, with a few other Japanese horror films, at the Vancouver International Film Festival, but it received increased attention when screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2000, where it received the FIPRESCI Prize and the KNF Award. Following a theatrical release in Japan, the film continued to play at festivals and had theatrical releases in the United States and United Kingdom, followed by several home media releases.
Audition was received positively by Western film critics on its release, with many noting the final torture sequence and its contrast with the non-horrific scenes before. The film has appeared on several lists of the best horror films ever made, and has had an influence on other horror films and directors including Eli Roth and the Soska sisters.
Plot[edit]
Shigeharu Aoyama is a widower whose son Shigehiko says that he should find a new wife. Shigeharu's friend Yasuhisa Yoshikawa, a film producer, devises a mock casting audition at which young women audition for the "part" of Shigeharu's new wife. Shigeharu is immediately enchanted by an applicant named Asami Yamazaki.
Yasuhisa cannot reach any of the references in Asami's résumé, such as a music producer she said she worked for, who is missing. However, Shigeharu is so enthralled that he pursues her anyway. She lives in a tiny apartment, containing little besides a large sack and a telephone. For four days after the audition, she sits perfectly still next to the phone waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, she answers, pretending that she never expected Shigeharu to call. After several dates, she accompanies him to a seaside hotel, where Shigeharu intends to propose marriage. She reveals burn scars on her body and before having sex, demands that Shigeharu pledge his love to her. Deeply moved, he agrees. In the morning, Asami is nowhere to be found.
Shigeharu tries to track her down but as Yasuhisa warned, all of the contacts on her résumé are dead ends. At the dance studio where she trained, he finds a man with prosthetic feet who tortured Asami when she was a child, causing her burn scars. The bar where she worked has been abandoned for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner. The police found three extra fingers, an extra ear, and an extra tongue when they recovered the body; Shigeharu has hallucinations of the body pieces.
Meanwhile, Asami goes to Shigeharu's house and finds a photo of his late wife. Enraged, she drugs his liquor. Shigeharu comes home, pours a drink, and is drugged. A flashback shows that the sack in Asami's apartment contains a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog dish and the man hungrily consumes it.
Asami injects Shigeharu with a paralytic agent that leaves his nerves alert, and tortures him with needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else, he has failed to love only her. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She inserts needles below his eyes and cuts off his left foot with a wire saw. Shigehiko returns home and Asami attacks the boy. Shigeharu appears to suddenly wake up back in the hotel, his current ordeal seeming to be only a nightmare. He proposes marriage and Asami accepts. As he falls back asleep, he returns to reality - his previous awakening was false - to find his son fighting Asami. Shigehiko kicks her downstairs, breaking her neck. Shigeharu tells his son to call the police and stares at the dying Asami, who repeats what she said on one of their dates about her excitement on seeing him again.
Themes[edit]
Critics have considered Audition as both feminist and misogynistic.[6] Miike has stated that when he met journalists in the United Kingdom and France, he found they commented on the film's feminist themes when Asami gets revenge on the men in her life.[7] The film sets up Aoyama with traits and behaviors which could be considered sexist: a list of criteria for his bride to meet, and the phony audition format he uses to search for future wife.[8] Tom Mes, author of Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, stated that the torture sequence, with the mutilation of Aoyama, can be seen as revenge from Asami.[8] Dennis Lim of the Los Angeles Times examined similar themes, noting that the film is "ultimately about the male fear of women and female sexuality" and that women are blatantly objectified in the first half of the film, only to have Asami "redress this imbalance" in the second half when she becomes an "avenging angel".[9] Chris Pizzello, writing in the American Cinematographer, stated that one plausible approach to interpreting the film is to see the final act as a representation of Aoyama's guilt at his mistreatment of women and his desire to dominate them. Aoyama develops a paranoid fantasy of an attacking object: because he harbours sadistic thoughts towards women, he develops a fear that the object will retaliate.[10] Contrary to this, Miike has stated that the final torture scenes in the film are not a paranoid nightmare dreamed up by Aoyama.[11] Tom Mes has argued against the feminist portrayal of the film, noting that Asami is not motivated by an ideological agenda, and that acknowledging that she takes revenge on a man who has lied to her would be ignoring that she has also lied to Aoyama.[8] Asami states "I want to tell you everything" during the torture scene, implying she had not been truthful before.[8] Mes also notes that the avenging angel theme contradicts a feminist-themed revenge interpretation, given that one of Asami's victims is female.[8][12]
In Audition, the character of Asami is a victim of child abuse. Colette Balmain, in her book Introduction to Japanese Horror Film, described Asami as "just one more face of the wronged women in Japanese culture... They are victims of repression and oppression, and only death and loneliness remain for them".[13] The film critic Robin Wood wrote that through her child abuse, Asami is taught that love and pain must be inseparable.[14] The audience is led to identify with Asami through this victimization and also what Stephen LeDrew described as a "patriarchal Japanese society".[10] Elvis Mitchell (The New York Times) stated that the theme of the film was: "the objectification of women in Japanese society and the mirror-image horror of retribution it could create".[15] Tom Mes suggested that these themes can be witnessed in the scene where Asami feeds her mutilated prisoner and then turns into the childhood version of herself and pets him like a dog.[16] Mes concludes that this is done to suggest that what had happened in Asami's life had made her the violent adult seen in the film.[16]