SXSW2004–Code 46/Gozu

Yep. Time for another South By Southwest Film Festival. I always love this time of year, but I’m a little disappointed in the selection this year. Of the 184 films (that includes all of the shorts) in the festival, I’ve already seen eight of them and had a chance to see a ninth. Between Telluride and the Butt-Numb-A-Thon I’m almost all movied out for this festival! Hell, one of the films already played SXSW two years ago under a different title!! (The Party’s Over used to be called Last Party 2000.) But enough bitching. Let’s get to the reason you’re all here: the films.

CODE 46

Michael Winterbottom has been making smart British films (many with their titles taken from songs) for about a decade and a half. As far as I know this is his first venture into the sci-fi universe. But, really, it’s just a romance that happens to take place in the future.

William (Tim Robbins) is an investigator looking for someone who is selling fake papelles. (They’re basically passports.) He has taken a virus that makes him empathic. All he needs is one fact about someone and he can tell everything else about them.

He soon meets Maria (Samantha Morton) and falls desperately in love even though he knows that she is the one selling the papelles. (And even though he has a wife and son back home.) The two begin an affair and then she is whisked away. When he finds her again her memory has been erased so that she doesn’t remember ever meeting him.

Think of this as Brief Encounter meets Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. (Even the narration is strange like Brief Encounter. “You rented a car and drove it to my place. Did you think you would find me?”)

The movie is pretty slow, but it is a very smart sci-fi film that is obviously not to everyone’s liking. If ya ain’t got no guns, ya ain’t got no audience. Too bad for them. Code 46 is a pretty good film with two great actors putting in some very good performances.

I loved the vision of the future. It’s not a particularly happy vision, but, like Blade Runner, it’s a very interesting vision. English has been turned into a mish-mash of every different language. The world has been turned into a desert and the sun is said to be very dangerous. And everyone is controlled to an extent that free will is almost non-existent.

Code 46, by the way, is a law that keeps people with the same genetic code from procreating. With that knowledge (given to us at the beginning of the film) you pretty much know where the film is going, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still a good ride.

Those sex scenes were pretty weird, though. One was just shot strangely and the second was just plain disturbing.

GOZU

I love Takashi Miike. I think he is one of the most interesting, fun, weird and just plain alive directors making films today. From Fudoh to Ichi The Killer I don’t think he’s made a bad film.

Which is why it’s all the more painful to report that Gozu is probably the worst film I saw at SXSW this year.

Minami (Hideki Sone) is kind of a low man on the totem pole in a Yakuza gang. His brother, Ozaki (Miike regular Sho Aikawa) is his mentor, but lately he’s been going a little crazy. In the first scene he says something about Yakuza hit dogs and proceeds to beat the shit out of a little dog outside the window of the shop they are in. (That’s a pretty cool scene.)

Minami is sent on a trip with Ozaki. On that trip he is to kill his brother. Unfortunately for him, everything goes wrong.

Unfortunately for us, nothing that goes wrong is very interesting. For two hours there are exactly three interesting things that happen: 1) A woman can’t stop lactating. (Miike is repeating himself for the first time. He did this in Visitor Q.) 2) Another woman is reading her lines off of cue cards. 3) The aforementioned dog scene.

Then there’s the ending, which is pure Miike. It’s the best part of the whole movie and is so over the top strange that it almost seems completely tacked on just to make sure that we know this is in fact a Miike film.

For the first time ever Miike actually bored me. And it pains me to type that line. The closest thing that I can compare this movie to is U-Turn. A guy goes to a strange town, meets a lot of strange people and can’t seem to leave. And it’s all just strange for the sake of strange. There’s no real story to any of this. Imagine if Lynch and Cronenberg had a really boring love child and you would come close to this movie.

I feel bad for people seeing this as their first exposure to Miike. They will probably never want to see another one of his films again. And if they make that decision they will be missing out on a lot of great cinema. (The guy puts out about three movies a year, so there is a LOT of it.)