Cure

Watched as part of a double feature with Se7en, which I think is a popular double feature. (I had to stop in the middle and return to this the next day, so it's not really a double feature after all.) Coming in one year after a really great role in Shall We Dance, Koji Yakusho works with Kiyoshi Kurosawa. A little bit like Somerset in Se7en, his character, Takabe, feels the need to discover meaning in something incomprehensible: a series of extremely similar murders, but apparently separate perpetrators. There are, I think, more differences than similarities between them, though, since Takabe is a relative optimist compared to Somerset. I think there's a lot to set these two movies apart, as well. While it's true that the colors are often muted, Cure is a more colorful film than Se7en. Se7en starts already mired in incomprehensible horror, but Cure is about the descent into obscurity on the part of our detective, and the intrusion of the outside on the parts of our victims. Every interpenetration is contagious, as our mysterious friend sees inside the people he meets, spreading his weird amnesia to them as he does so, and causing them to kill people they know, or even love. Our mysterious stranger turns out to be none other than Mamiya, a psychology student obsessed with Mesmerism, the occult/psychological theory and movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. But although there is a violation happening to Takabe, as well, in the process of his descent, his mind is receptive despite himself, perhaps because like Mamiya himself, Takabe's true identity is void. There is no internal self, only two alternating modes, husband and detective. As Mamiya declares, "Neither one is the real you. There is no real you." For a bit of a kick, he adds, "Your wife knows that, too." Already, by the time Takabe brings the case against Mamiya forward, Mamiya refers to the two of them as a pair, who must be understood together, perhaps even cannot be understood separately. There are many stunning moments in this film, but I'd like to point out the flashing, free-associative images that flash through Takabe's mind as he sits in his car just before he rushes home to discover his wife Fumie's apparent suicide, a sudden intuitive and pre-rational connection between his current case and his wife's own condition as a short-term amnesiac. As he collapses to his knees sobbing with grief, he sees the true vision of his wife standing before him, confused. The external realization of his grief in the form of an intense waking nightmare. Takabe finds himself constantly shutting off a loud washing-machine filled with nothing, which Fumie fails to understand is empty. When he returns, he'll find her missing or discover she's done illogical things like leave an uncooked, partially-thawed piece of meat on the dinner plate. He feels burdened, and is burdened, by her condition, a condition which makes it hard for either of them to live, which seems to foreclose any hopeful future he could have imagined. In one moment, he sits in the back of a bus, breaking the news to his wife that they're not going on a trip to Okinawa. She forgets what he said and fantasizes about Okinawa, and through the windows we can see a sky swirling with clouds. It's never clear whether this really happens or is something that he's imagined. Increasingly, this film creates an implication of supernaturalism, propped up by the inclusion of Mesmerism, a psychological theory with probable roots in the occult. Things begin to happen which reach beyond the possible, and the coherency of Takabe's life begins to wane. The earliest material on hypnotism in Japan seems to include a shared element with the current case, and seems to have also ended in a killing. Sakuma tells Takabe that the practice of hypnotism seems to have been driven underground by official suppression in the Meiji era, providing a further occult connection. It's at this moment that Sakuma experiences a waking vision, either of the future or the past, carrying the sensation of something which simultaneously hasn't yet happened and something which happened long ago, a vision of the place which appeared in Takabe's free-association earlier. And then the two of them discover the large X in Sakuma's bedroom. If you're bought in at this point, this scene is a horrifying, if ambiguous, dual revelation which successfully casts doubt on everything we believe we know about the two men in that room. The ending is fucking bleak. It would be easy to assume that it suggests none of the players were really controlling their own actions, but...in fact, there was one case which called into question whether or not this hypnotism ever overrides the hidden desires or impulses of its victims. After all, didn't Oida want to cut open men? Didn't Takabe want to be unburdened? I wonder if there's a connection between the hypnotic X in Cure and the Operator symbol in Marble Hornets? I figure you could probably connect that series to j-horror in general, since it draws on themes and tricks common to j-horror. A decent double feature would be this film and Oldboy, I think. Oldboy first, of course, then this film afterwards with its more obvious themes of hypnotic suggestion. "Once upon a time in a forest lived a man and his beautiful daughter. One day a golden carriage drawn by six horses stopped before their house. Out of the carriage stepped a king. 'Would you give me your daughter to be my wife?' he asked the man. Delighted, the man agreed." switch to close-up: "Truth be told, the king was very handsome, his only flaw being his beard, which was blue. Apart from this, there was no fault to be found with him."