Labyrinth of Dreams (1997)

 

Director: Gakuryû "Sogo" Ishii

Screenplay: Gakuryû "Sogo" Ishii

Cast: Tadanobu Asano as Tatsuo Niitaka; Kotomi Kyôno as Chieko Yamashita; Tomoka Kurotani as Tsuyako Tukikawa; Kirina Mano as Aiko; Reiko Matsuo as Mineko Matsuura; Kyûsaku Shimada as Kuro-Tonbi no kyaku; Takeshi Ikeda as Tsuwaomote

An Abstract Candidate

 

The change Sogo Ishii made, the trajectory, to becoming Gakuryû Ishii means more and more when you start to see the films made during the decades from the transition. Slowly, but surely, his work is being made available, but even in little pieces, you can suddenly see an abrupt transition from Burst City (1982), his punk dystopian film with abrasive editing and a punk soundtrack, and how alien it is by the time you get to Labyrinth of Dreams, a sombre period based drama set in yet its own dream world. Yet the transformation is compelling for an auteur that clearly evolved, realising after his initial films he wanted to step in other directions and managed to succeed fully. Ishii found, here as with Angel Dust (1994), a drastic change in direction, building from the eighties, that lead to him finding his own distinct eeriness which he constructed for these films.

Labyrinth of Dreams is set in the past, a comparison apt to another Japanese film hard to see appropriate, that being Mikio Naruse's Hideko, the Bus Conductor (1941). A quiet drama, set in the era it was made into the forties, both films tackle the concept of the "bus girls” (basu gâru), of a tradition from between the early 1920s to the mid-1960s when buses would have only a driver, male in both films, and a female bus girl to assist him¹. In Hideko..., it is a lighter drama where a duo attempt to salvage their bus service, in danger of being lost in a rural town with their boss more interested in money, by adding a tourist side of explaining the historical locations of their routes for the bus conductor Okoma, played by Hideko Takamine, so popular her name rather than her character's gets the film title billing. Labyrinth of Dreams, clearly set in the thirties to forties, is a much ominous narrative where a mysterious male bus driver has been seducing the bus girls he has worked with, only for him to, like an unmarried Bluebeard, dispose of them in faked bus accidents. For Tomiko (Rena Komine), working at one company and still dealing with the death of someone dear to her was a victim, she believes her company's new hire Tatsuo (Tadanobu Asano) is that man. Tatsuo immediately tries to get close to her, with Tomiko deliberately trying to stay her distance as much to catch him. His aura however proves a wear-and-tear which may seal her fate, drawn to him more with the danger itself part of the aura.

The premise is one, even in its historically specific context, that you could adapt in any aesthetic, a romantic thriller in premise which you could sell easily, but Gakuryû Ishii makes a film from material that is unconventional but not from any deliberately aesthetic choice. Beyond the fact, as a late nineties films, he made the film in black-and-white this film takes it time to draw you in. Like Angel Dust, Ishii manages the mercurial trick of taking these premises, slowing them down to an eerie and intense mood which crawls under the skin. This is different to that film because it is almost timeless despite its clear history context. You see this as a time with Western influences and modernity influencing the rural town setting, Tatsuo introduces himself on his first day with Western sweets for the female co-workers and Western cigars for the male ones, but with the bus travelling through the countryside, including isolated environments, stillness can be felt throughout.

Until later on it is entirely a gently paced drama, taking its time until only when Tomiko starts to fall for Tatsuo to change, falling into his trap as the film around her drifts to being more dreamlike without the need for surrealism or unconventional editing techniques. The acting helps considerably, alongside being a poignant reminder, virtually ageless, of how Tadanobu Asano became one of my favorite actors, instantly the cool actor of cult Japanese cinema for many by the 2000s, but someone who always picked great roles, always did great performances even in ultraviolent work like Ichi the Killer (2001). That the film is also reliant on a very idiosyncratic aspect too, as the deaths are caused by staged bus accidents, adding the one perverse side of the drama. One of the bus girls' main jobs in this world, as for Tomiko, is to step outside the bus and help the drivers be aware of crossing rural train lines when no trains are moving nearby. Used to considerable effect in the climax, a film sweltering in dreamy unease, the resulting film in its glacial tone is compelling.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eerie

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) This information barely details the "bus girl" with any knowledge. Yet the knowledge of the likes of Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan, a 2013 non-fiction text by Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller and Christine Yano exists out there for people like me to desperately want to read on subjects like this.

Angel Dust (1994)

Director: Gakuryû "Sogo" Ishii

Screenplay: Yorozu Ikuta and Gakuryû "Sogo" Ishii

Cast: Kaho Minami as Setsuko Suma; Takeshi Wakamatsu as Rei Aku; Etsushi Toyokawa as Tomoo; Ryoko Takizawa  as Yuki Takei

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #178 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

With sad eyes the camel pleads, "Kill me".

The synopsis suggests a traditional murder mystery, the kind that was popular in the West as they were here in the nineties onwards. Setsuko Suma (Kaho Minami) is a forensic investigator known for her ability to enter the mind state of killers, brought in to a seemingly random series of murders of women on crowded subway trains. All clues point to her former lover Rei Aku (Takeshi Wakamatsu), a researcher in an incredibly controversial psychological practice of deprogramming religious cult members. Inherently that evokes a couple of films like Manhunter (1986) with a couple of idiosyncratic touches, but Angel Dust is something else entirely.

Within a decade, made during a ten year absence of theatrical cinema when he worked in other mediums, what a surprising change took place to Sogo "Gakuryû" Ishii, the cult director who in the the late seventies  and early eighties started off having directed punk sci-fi films like Burst City (1982) or filming Einstürzende Neubauten performances. Into the nineties here, Ishii (long before he adopted the name "Gakuryû" as he did into the 2000s) changes completely and mixes what David Fincher's Se7en (1995) wanted to do alongside the crime thriller tropes evoked in that synopsis, and turning them into this cold, glacially oppressive piece of psychological drama. Whilst Michael Mann, director of Manhunter, is cool and collected on the dangers of entering the mind of a killer, and Fincher in Se7en had a highly elaborate art style he would chip away over the decades as he evolved, Angel Dust is undeniably without ever straying in genre tropes outside of crime and murder thrillers an incredibly unsettling psychological horror film which creeps you out to the end.

A noticeable aesthetic is here. Mid nineties Japanese pulp genre film making, Japan's psycho geographical and aesthetic style as a landscape, is shown at its richest here, from the neon soaked streets to cramped and darkly lit night train rides, with brief glimmers of natural wildlife from the outside only. All of it is at ill ease, the modern environments befitting the neurosis that Angel Dust is laced in, one immediately wrong footing viewers as the first scenes are a man and a woman in the wilderness, going on an expedition deep in a cave that seemingly makes no sense to what happens in the rest of the film. The woman is Setsuko, who is assigned on a case where a figure is killing seemingly random women on crowded subway trains with a poisoned syringe of some sort. How Setsuko is even introduced, this sequence in the cave leading to the discovery of the bones of the dead, and her to be awaken from inside an isolation tank having dreamt this, immediate sets up something dreamlike in this, setting up a film just this side of psychic and supernatural inferences being involved.

Soon into the case, from one of the first victims, we are introduced to Rei, a sinister figure who worked with a murder victim of the case who was a former member of a religious cult he deprogrammed. His sinister nature is compounded by how, whoever exactly is the killer, he has an unnatural influence over Setsuko still, a command that he uses in his work and makes him an alarming candidate for the killer. Setsuko herself finds she is falling off the rails the longer she is in the mindset of this killer to try to capture them. It is, plot wise without spoiling it, a bleak film, the ending a disturbing one as control over a person psychologically, brain washing them through suggestion, even spiritual and mental poisoning, to emotional isolation taking place and leaving one  sick.

That and how Ishii, with this pulp story plot, creates the film through a sleep and quiet ill ease. Unlike Michael Mann's aesthetic, Ishii has a plot which drifts in and out of its plot, one prolonged scene an entire video of a deprogramming of a female cult member which comes off, just with words, as torture than removing superstition from them. The sound design includes of sharp noise and jolts. The film's plot for long parts of its length is seen through other forms. Recreations of the murder on a subway train with stand ins. Security footage or photographs. On screen, neon green newspaper headlines chronicling the case. Everything is cold and distant. Plot points, like Setsuko's psychological illness the longer she stays in this case, isolating herself from her loving husband, initially the safe haven from all this, are as calmly and casually dealt with as possible without great emphasis on exposition.

It is, as this genre was coming into its popularity in the nineties onwards, an incredible rebuttal to them in how subdued it is, even the murder weapon a mere needle to the breast. The one moment which feels from a more lurid film is surreal as, the killer moving away from the subways, someone finds a pair of sever hands spinning in a washing machine. It would be silly if not in context absolutely disturbing. As Setsuko starts to lose control, everything becomes more claustrophobic, with streaks of the unconventional felt throughout. Noticeably, judging from the rest of his filmography, Ishii (to the point he changed his name) took on more mystical and abstract ideas, added them to his work. Psychology fights religious superstition transpire in the background here but neither looks good, psychology here under noble ideas but able to be used as a tool of control and death however. Even if the ending should be a happy conclusion, it comes with a numbed conclusion where, unexpectedly, a recognisable Western song plays over the end credits (The Zombies' Time of the Season) which is an inspired and eerie choice. There is, as a result, the best of balances where a film heavily reliant on a plot which drags you in on twists and turns eventually leads to an emotional resonance that lingers.

And even in terms of how idiosyncratic some of the dialogue is, Angel Dust beneath its sleek and guarded veneer is splitting with strangeness. Something from within it, which breaks out when a character is locked in a room, the television with Rei on it, even in recorded footage, telling them instructions yet saying they have freewill, lurches and causes the flesh to crawl as the film takes its time to progress. It is, as mentioned, bleak and can be seen as too uncomfortable for some. How Setsuko progresses from a strong female character to the finale in itself might be too uncomfortable for some too, but everything in Angel Dust is un-remotely exploitative or cheap, but more creepy and profounder.  

Abstract Spectrum: Claustrophobic/Cold/Disturbing/Oppressive

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None