Jisatsu saakuru
2001
Japan
Suicide Club
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
 Additional Images |
Comments: This is one of the funniest albeit confounding movies I have seen in a long long time. It's ridiculous to argue this movie is a mature and well-thought out essay on contemporary culture with an emphasis on the 'problem' of teen suicide. The Writer/Director is a skilled artist in the vein of Kim Ki-Duk. Both take a subject and present images on film that touch on that subject. They are intentionally ambiguous and incomplete.
Is it creepy and gross that 50 high school girls throw themselves in front of a train? Maybe. But it's so over the top it's funny; blood flying everywhere. Later on in the film the kids joke about the train skidding along on "Human Grease." Eeeeewwwww! When the kids jump off the school building, you can actually see stage hands tossing buckets of blood at the windows! Watch the scene where the detectives are at the station trying to prevent the next mass suicide. It's all comedy. "Do you have a tattoo?" ... "No she doesn't. I've seen her naked." One detective yawns long and wide. The oldest guy plays the perv when he sees a girl with a tattoo on her chest, but it's the young guy who complains: "Cheap tattoos, everyone's got 'em these days." It's that young detective who's the comedy relief throughout the film, ready to call ralph on the big white phone at any time. The middle section, with what many have described as Rocky-Horror meets Clockwork Orange, isn't all that funny, except Genesis, himself, is a laugh riot. He sings "Because the Dead .... shine all night long" in English, with a lisp, and it's hysterical. The whole scene is a modern dance masterpiece. OK, rape isn't funny and stomping on little kittens upsets me, but that's just schlock factor. A genre cliché. A childish move thrown in to appease the non-thinkers. All three songs by the pre-teen pop group Dessert, Desert, are as good as you can get. They are catchy and funny. This is a happy film with a happy ending. A connection is finally made between young and old, the pop group's work is done and the most suicidal of the teen-agers, the one whose boyfriend surprised her by landing on her when he jumped off a building but doesn't die until he's had time to discuss the irony of the event with her, (tell me that isn't pure comic genius), she doesn't commit suicide. She takes the train home like a good kid. She's the one who delivered the line: If your woman had a bent nose would you ask her why? The kid who coughs after every sentence when he is speaking to the detectives, it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't imply anything; it was not one of the Dessert girls trying to disguise her voice, it was just plain creepy for the sake of being creepy. It creeped me out and it's a perfect example of one of those things that just screams for some profound interpretation when there isn't one. Summary: 54 high school girls throw themselves in front of a subway train. This appears to be only the beginning of a string of suicides around the country. Does the new all-girl group Desert have anything to do with it? Detective Kuroda tries to find the answer, which isn't as simple as one could hope. |
||||||||||||||||||||||