Wednesday, September 27, 2006
DVD Review: Jigoku
In what must be the strangest film to enter the Criterion Collection this year, Japanese director Nobuo Nakagawa presents a confusing moral tale in which all the characters die at the end of the first hour. Then the film really begins.
Jigoku centers around Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), a young theology student who has just become engaged to his professor's daughter. Driving home with his friend Tamura (a Faustian presence played with diabolical menace by the Elvis-faced Yoichi Numata), he is involved in a fatal car accident. Although it was Tamura at the wheel, the guilt over the incident will haunt Shiro, and the guilt is compounded when everyone Shiro comes in contact with seems to die. Never mind that Shiro isn't directly responsible for any of these deaths. The weight of the guilt is crippling to him. This guy can't wait to get to hell and start burning.
The story continues down a twisty, confusing path (including a Vertigo twist that never seems to go anywhere), until arriving at a country retreat, where poisoned wine and rancid fish leaves all the remaining characters dead. The last forty minutes of the film are like Dante's Inferno as imagined by Mario Bava. People burn in lakes of fire, walk through fields of giant needles and are chopped to pieces by devils, while their sins are revealed. This should be much more horrifying than it is. The effect is more dazzling than sickening, a barrage of bizarre images seen through candy-colored filters and fog, a swirling cacophony of the screams of the damned.
Not to imply that Nakagawa's visual skills are only in evidence in the underworld. From the first frame, there are beautiful, trippy images. He seems to have a special affinity for the color red in the early part of the film: red roses, red dresses, red blood, red fire. Whether it is meant as a representation of sin and temptation or a foreshadowing of the flames of Hell (or both), there is more red in the living world than in the afterworld.
After kicking the film off with a disturbingly groovy title sequence (sexy girls posing while bombastic jazz and tortured screams play on the soundtrack), a title card introduces the concept that "religion dreams of a world where sins unpunished in life are punished in the afterlife." In Nakagawa's vision, it isn't the victims that are dreaming of justice for those that have oppressed them, it's the perpetrators who crave justice for the crimes they've gotten away with. And why not? After all, if you're being tormented by literal demons, you don't have to torment yourself.
The film, sought after for years by lovers of Asian horror, is presented in a new digital 2:35:1 anamorphic transfer that lets the colorful effects work pop out of the screen like an eyeball out of it's socket. There is a documentary, Designing the Inferno, which fills in the background on Nakagawa's career and the traditions of Japanese ghost stories on the screen as well as discussing the themes and production design of Jigoku. The interviews with Yoichi Namata, now sporting hippy hair and beard and bushy, grey eyebrows, are especially entertaining. The theatrical trailer is also included.
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