Audition Recensione

Review today Auditionand see how much more it is beautiful, powerful and disturbingis the source of two or three rather obvious considerations.
The first is that it is about big cinema, of that cinema that never gets old; the second is that it is a classic, where by classic we mean a work that, in any tense, is able to speak in the present and of the present; the third is that, although perhaps today the memory is weakened by time and visions, when the film began to circulate on screens all over the world, in 2000, more than twenty years ago, it really had to be an explosive and somewhat revolutionary experience.
Takashi Miike he has always been an avant-garde, and in some ways he still is, but what is certain is that in those years, in those very first years of the then new millennium, with films like this, like Ichi the Killer, The eye, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Visitor Q e Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, was truly the most magnetic, shocking and vital thing in world cinema. What served to fill the void that had been left by the inevitable decline, before and after thehandover that had returned that territory to China, of Hong Kong cinema.

Further proof of what Miike had pretty much got everything right Audition there is the fact that, despite little or nothing happening for a long time, the film sticks to the gaze (or the opposite, if you prefer) from the first scene.
As known, the beginning of Audition is very conventional, it tells a story – that of a man who remains a widower, and who years later, pushed by his son, takes it into his head to find a new wife – who could, for what he tells and how he tells it Miike, be the beginning of a romantic-family drama. Or even, as is evident from certain nuances, of a comedy.
Yet, at the same time, Miike already sows, in its own way, the uncanny hints of the horror to come. An example for all: the barman and his shaker, while the protagonist Aoyama and his producer friend talk about what their plan will become, the casting of a fake film in order to find a girl who is right for Aoyama.

They are enough to Miike a couple of editing cuts (such as the one that moves the appointment between Aoyama and Asami from a bar to an elegant restaurant) to tilt the plane of the story just enough to move it – almost imperceptibly at the beginning, and more and more evident then – from the real to the dreamlike, from the everyday to the horrific. Horror that already emerges, in its unsettling perturbation, in the first scene in which we see Asami in her house, between a devilish smile and a mysterious and eerie sack that rolls away.
From Aoyama’s awakening in a hotel bed from which Asami has vanished forward, Miike pushes hard on the accelerator, the story plane doesn’t tilt it but overturns it, and Audition turns into a waking nightmare capable of being surreal and very concrete at the same timeand which culminates in the torture sequence which has also become famous for the reactions it was able to arouse in the spectators.
But be careful, because the sadism and cruelty and perversion staged by Miike (here as elsewhere, by the way) are anything but gratuitousand one could even speak of a certain degenerate elegance, even in the toughest and harshest moments – biting and cutting, if you pass me the tasteless joke – of the film.

However, the question is not aesthetic, but rather content. Of what Audition was and is telling its viewers.
Today, in the #MeToo post, the theme of feminist-feminist revenge for a life of abuse, violence and abandonment flashes even more clearly, which is expressed according to altered and psychotic trajectories. Just as certain behaviors that today would be defined as “patriarchal” of the protagonist become even more evident.
And yet, faced with the gazes that Aoyama and Asami meet at the end of the film, when both are on the ground, neutralized, wounded, paralyzed, gazes that betray dismay and disappointment more than anger and resentment, and a pain that is not so much physical as well as psychological, we realize that, after all, Audition is truly a sentimental, family, existential drama. It is the story of lonely and therefore wounded individuals, victims each in their own way of social constructs and gender roles, desperately seeking a dream of love and human contact that turns out to be unreal and devastating.
Miike, on the other hand, had said it from the beginning.
Ever since he had exchanged impressions of a video of guys at a concert with a colleague, and the discussion soon turned cynical and disillusioned: “Everyone in Japan is alone,” says the man watching the video with Aoyama. “You too?” the protagonist asks him then. “Why not you?” is the answer, accompanied by an eloquent smile.