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From: blp Category: Films Date: 07 October 2006 Time: 08:54 AM Review: The box quotes someone describing it as 'a masterpiece of extreme cinema' and it's part of some DVD company's 'Asia Extreme' series, so you know it's going to be, like, extreme, whatever that means. I'm such a limply effete Euro sixties art film snob that I've generally assumed it meant something bad, but it suddenly occurred to me that I was curious, especially after seeing a brief clip from this of a blond man with Chelsea smiler cuts in his cheek blowing smoke through them. One would assume this blond was Ichi since he also appears on the box above the title, but he's not, he's Kakihara, a flamboyantly trendy Yakuza second in command who's boss has been killed by Ichi. Ichi is a boyish man with a neat, almost bowl haircut, who goes around in a black superhero type outfit slashing people up with knives attached to his heels. There's a plot, obviously, but it's not really worth going into here. The main thing is that Ichi and Kakihara are being inexorably drawn together for a final showdown by both a hypnotic evil genius (disguised as a loser in an anorak) and the demands of convention/audience expectation etc. Along the way, both protagonists engage in some fairly 'extreme' behavior, Ichi doing his knife heel karate thing, slicing people up like salamis, blood and long strings of intestine everywhere, and Kakihara visiting atrocities both on others (mostly in the form of long, pointed metal rods driven through their faces) and himself (notably in a barely watchable scene in which he cuts a substantial portion of his own tongue off). Domo subarashi! I expected to be nonplussed by all this, but, darnit, found it so good, I watched it twice. What got me wasn't the gore per se, but something intriguingly difficult to express about the Ichi character. Trying to say what that is is probably a bit like giving away the end of the film - and I'll probably do that too, so, if you don't want to know the result, look away....now. First off, Ichi obviously occupies the place of the traditional film hero, but spectacularly wrongly. He's like a superhero gone demented and possessed of powers that, anyway, were always going to result in a bloodbath. That means that, before we've actually seen him, as long as we know him solely by his deeds, he appears less hero than villain, referred to in hushed, respectful tones by the underworld characters who've never met him, only stumbled into his viscera strewn crime scenes. It's a good joke, but also more, that the object of their fear, rather akin to the fear of a father or an authority figure, is actually just the embodiment of that psychotherapeutic explanatory mainstay, 'a very frightened little boy'. This means that as soon as we really get a good look at Ichi, a freaky tension is set up between long habituated expectations of a character like this to be some kind of redeemer and his actual deeds, which, aside from the slayings, largely seem to consist, in the words of an old joke of a friend of mine’s, of ‘crying and masturbating’. Thus we get a brief glimpse of him peeking through the window of pimp who is viciously beating up a prostitute. Pimp realizes someone’s there, goes to the balcony and finds only a copious amount of jism ejaculated onto a pot plant. There’s such a superhuman amount of it that it drips into a large puddle on the ground, where Ichi’s name appears in it as opening title. Then, still not really sure who we’re dealing with, we see Ichi again, the wide-eyed boy man, getting head from the beat-up prostitute in a seedy club. She comments that he’s the only customer who likes girls with beat-up faces. He asks her if she’d like him to kill her pimp for her and when she looks like she might be amenable to the idea, he grabs her head and forces it back onto his groin. Then, finally, he returns to the same scene of her being beaten up by her pimp and this time is discovered, hauled into the room and punched in the face. He’s wearing his black superhero uniform and the pimp asks him why he’s wearing it and why he’s crying. ‘I’m not crying’, Ichi replies angrily and untruthfully. Then the knives emerge from the heels of his shoes and he goes into karate action, slicing the pimp in half in a moment of comically crude CGI. At this moment a look of comic joy appears on Ichi’s face and he gets a bulging erection, visible through his tight costume, and grabs it. The prostitute is looking at him in total terror. ‘I killed him for you as I promised’, says Ichi. This doesn’t alleviate her terror. Unhshakably euphoric, he then attempts to reassure her, ‘But don’t worry – I’ll still beat you up.’ ‘You’ll still beat me up?’ she says. ‘Yes!’ She’s reaching for a baseball bat now. ‘Thank you!’ she says, then lunges with the bat. Ichi goes into action again then watches in distress as she dies spraying blood from her jugular vein. This is the kind of stuff you could watch without subtitles in a foreign country and think, ‘Wow, this looks unbelievably interesting, but maybe that’s only because I don’t really know what’s going on.’ But no, in this case, it’s easily as interesting as it looks, if not more so. I only wish I had all the shrinky knowhow to properly unpack it. 'This Ichi's a real sadist', says one of the gangsters and, for a while, I thought, yes, that's right, literally, a person stuck at Freud's stage of infant sadism. Actually, I don't know anything about this, but it sounded good and fit some of the facts. Anyone who's ever glanced at a Manga comic will have seen the exaggerated expressions of the characters: mouths open like sieves to hurl Kanji screams across the page, tears flowing like milk from a teat and sudden shifts from extreme sadness to expressions of exultation. The film is based on a manga and Ichi’s expressions throughout, especially in the prostitute scene, are just the same. The surprise is finding that all this exaggeration is actually being used to a purpose, to represent someone who is literally an overgrown baby. This comes to hilarious fruition at the end of the film with Ichi, shot in the leg, lying on a rooftop bawling, shedding such copious tears that it makes a wet patch on the tarmac, while Kakihara helplessly cajoles him to get up, ‘Come on. How are going to have our challenge match?’ Such a good joke: it’s all a game, at least to Kakihara, whom the film has built up as ‘the ultimate masochist’ and who, prior to Ichi’s arrival, has been eagerly anticipating it as a chance, finally, to feel really scared. When Ichi first comes at him on the roof, Kakihara backs away with a gleeful expression, saying, ‘Oh boy, I’m really scared!’ In this respect, he’s like an expression of the thrill-seeking film audience’s desire and what’s especially good is the way the film threatens to thwart that desire by reneging on the promised ‘challenge match’. Effectively, it’s the old joke about what a sadist does to a masochist: nothing. And in making it, a neat point is made about the masochism of the audience. How then to explain the curious pull of all this for the audience – at least for me? ‘Innocence defiled’ was the first thing I thought of, then immediately rejected, thinking that the horror of Ichi was his absolute innocence. But no, it’s more complicated than that. There are the erections and ejaculations to deal with for a start. These are more than just a lurid detail. The hypnotist character who’s controlling Ichi is blocked in his efforts at a certain point by Ichi’s inability to come. His solution is to send a girl round, hypnotized, pretending to be a girl Ichi believes he saw raped while he was at highschool. She tells Ichi that she actually wanted him to rape her and now wants him to cut her into little pieces. He gets an erection and she sucks him off, her swallow indicating that the blocked ejaculation has finally been overcome. Ichi looks to the sky in a moment of apparent, joyful epiphany, ‘realising’ that the raped girl wanted him to rape her because she didn’t want him to rape her and that sailor, the luckless prostitute from the beginning, wanted him to cut her up because she didn’t want him to cut her up. Hooray! He happily rushes off to put on his killer shoes and slice up the girl, who comes out of her trance just in time to protest that she’s not the raped girl and she doesn’t want to be sliced up. No good. Ichi has been bullshitly inducted into the world of paradox where violence is kindness, sex is death and, one for all you rapists out there, no always means yes. This stuff isn’t just Orwellian double-think or a rationale for rape, especially since it doesn’t even seem that Ichi wants to commit these violations of women. His joy in these situations is that of the good child who thinks he’s finally figured out how to please the maddeningly contradictory authority figures. This is his confusion and the film subjects the audience to the same confusion, signally, in a world of near absolute corruption, presenting the most innocent character as also the most fearsome and destructive. Perhaps ‘innocence defiled’ is right after all – defiled both by the world and its nefarious influences and by its own bodies bizarre sexual functions. There’s more, there must be, but I think I’ve hit the explanation I was looking for. Is this longest WWR piece ever? Sorry, I couldn’t stop. Thanks for reading. See this film. It’s genius.