Go, Go, Second-Time Auteur
by Steve Dollar
Wakamatsu took a break from the camera in 1977, and didn?t return for 27 years. But he still wants to mess with your head. Don't get the wrong idea, though?Caterpillar is not The Human Centipede. It's worse. And it's worse because the horrors it details are not a fantasy, but a wartime allegory. War is hell, they say. And in this 2010 film, which opened in New York this week, that hell isn't only the atrocity of the film's opening frames, set during the second Sino-Japanese War of 1940. It's what happens when handsome village son Kyuzo (Shima Ohnishi) returns home from combat missing both arms and legs, his face horribly burned, with scarce capacity for speech or hearing. The helpless "war god" really is a caterpillar, and the constant burden of the horrified Shigeko (the sublime Shinobu Terajima, who won the best actress prize at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival), his wife, whose complex arc of emotions gradually betrays strange new emotions underneath the stoic acceptance of patriotic duty. She takes a certain pleasure in the reversal of marital dynamics. 
The film is a brutal indictment of Japanese militarism and how it trickles down to the micro level of rural villages, where even a ruined shell of man becomes a local celebrity, paraded around in a wheelbarrow. Though he's working in a more stately fashion, with long static medium shots and measured rhythms, the director can be as thoroughly shocking as ever?and unexpectedly amusing even in such a dark scenario. Shigeko's first instinct, as she shares a quiet moment with her deformed husband, is to strangle him to death. Kyuzo resists, wordlessly gasping something urgent. He needs to relieve himself, and that basic biological necessity spares his life, as Shigeko begins to laugh at the absurdity. She finds an urn and patiently lets him fill it. But a good wife's duties never end. There's a terrific, old Harlan Ellision short story called "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Well, that's Kyuzo's problem, too. About the only functional body part he's got left is his dick, which he soon puts to incessant use. The unsettling sideshow nature of the sex scenes quickly fade into a range of things: comedy, horror, domestic power plays, sweet relief, unholy torture. "Eat, sleep. Eat, sleep. That's all you do!" Shigeko screams at him. In a conventional melodrama, this would be the cue for a heartbreaking surge of emotion, perhaps, or some triumph of the human spirit crap. Here, though, her husband's plight has taken away his power to hurt Shigeko, even as his war medals for bravery empower her with newfound status in a village where everyone worships the military, save for a fey, portly fool who runs around eating flowers (a character the director describes as his pacifist surrogate). 
Pushed to her limits, she finally begins punching him, reciprocating the treatment she's received at his hands, as Kyuzo suffers flashbacks to the crimes he committed in the emperor?s name: the savage rape and murder of Chinese women as Japan's troops rampaged through the mainland. The film is adapted from a 1930s short story by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (the pen name is a transliteration of "Edgar Allan Poe"), which was subsequently censored by the Japanese government during a war that saw unthinkable atrocities visited upon the Chinese. Opening in New York next week, The City of Life and Death is a Chinese fictionalization of such a scenario, revisiting the so-called Rape of Nanking, in which 300,000 people died in a mere six weeks. Wakamatsu, whose 2008 docudrama United Red Army (which has a delayed New York opening soon, as well) turns a critical eye to left-wing extremism of the ?60s and ?70s, and asserts that no war is just. Violence deforms hearts and minds as surely as physical bodies, and war merely institutionalizes it. Caterpillar, with its bravura performances and unflinching depictions of human indignities, graces and cruelties, brings a quietly devastating argument to the most intimate setting.
Posted by ahillis at May 7, 2011 8:56 AM
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/greencine/daily/~3/nRIQDBZjSY4/008054.html
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