Dir. Miike Takashi, 2001, Japan, 86 mins, subtitles
Cast: Kenichi Endo, Fujiko, Jun Mutô, Shoko Nakahara, Shungiku Uchida, Kazushi Watanabe
Review by Chris Regan
You would not think that a film that opens with a man having sex with his teenage daughter would be a heart-warming tale of a dysfunctional family reunited. But for all its violence, rape, drug abuse and necrophilia the story at the heart of Visitor Q is a warm, uplifting and familiar one twisted into something new and depraved on the surface by the forever-controversial Japanese director Miike Takashi.
The film centres around the Yamazaki family with much of the story taking place in their house and filmed to resemble any family-based reality TV show. Kiyoshi Yamazaki (Endo) is a disgraced TV producer who decides to film the brutal bullying of his son, Takuya (Mutô), in order to rescue his career. As a result of his bullying, Takuya beats up his mother, Keiko (Uchida), who turns to drugs (funded through prostitution) for comfort. The fourth member of the family, daughter Miki (Fujiko), has run away from home and also turned to prostitution. Order is finally brought to this chaotic, miserable excuse for a family by the visitor (Watanabe) who befriends Kiyoshi by hitting him twice on the head with a large rock.
It hardly needs to be said that Visitor Q is not an easy film to watch. All of the depravities are shown in the most graphic and realistic way possible – through the lens of a digital video camera and filmed in tortuously long takes. Often the camera is external which does take the edge off some of the realism, but at its most disturbing the film is shown through Kiyoshi’s camera giving us an unsettling first-person perspective.
Despite all this the film never pretends to take place in the real world and the more surreal scenes such as the visitor’s entrance serve as welcome reminders of this. Although seemingly exploitative and unnecessary at first, it soon becomes clear that the violence is essential to the story and expresses extremes of basic emotions we all experience. The clearest example of this is the gradual deconstruction of the Yamazaki household represented in the physical destruction of their house through Takuya’s fights with his mother and the firework attacks of the bullies. It also becomes clear as Kiyoshi films one of these attacks that the primary emotional problem that the characters face is actually a complete lack of emotion in the face of their problems. For this reason the disturbingly graphic nature of the film is validated in showing how far the family has retreated into numbness.
The Japanese film industry works in a way that is closer to the early Hollywood factory system in that restrictions on budget and schedules are balanced by greater creative control and a high production volume. As a result Miike Takashi has directed over 50 films in only 13 years in the industry making him incredibly difficult to categorise. Bizarrely the film that Visitor Q most closely resembles is The Happiness Of The Katakuris (2002) – Miike’s light-hearted musical comedy about a family’s triumph over the problems of running a hotel. This film too is concerned with the re-unification of a family and although wildly different in tone achieves the same results. However, what most clearly separates Visitor Q from Miike’s other work is its budget (around US$70,000), which serves as further proof that interesting and important films can be made with limited funds and, more importantly, a lot of imagination.
Although a must-see for all Miike fans, Visitor Q is not for everyone. The film is slow moving at times and on first viewing the emotional indifference of the family is incredibly frustrating. Naturally, it also has a highly experimental feel but is thought-provoking enough to be an experiment with a purpose. Thankfully reality TV has never gone this far but Visitor Q reassures us that cinema will always go further and will always be able to reflect the depravity of our own morbid curiosity as a result.
