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Happiness
of the Katikuris
review by Carrie Gorringe, 21 June 2002
28th Seattle International Film
Festival How best to
describe Takashi Miike's latest film, Happiness of the Katikuris?
Well, take a touch of an Old-Dark-House scenario, mix it with a
Stanley Donen-Vincente Minnelli musical style, mix it all up with
the sickest of sensibilities and serve it straight up with a
straight-faced flair. Best known for his ultra-violent yakusa
films such as Ichi the Killer, the gut-wrenching Audition,
and Agitator (the latter also playing at this year's
festival), Takashi eschews his traditional line of work to present
the would-be fairy-tale life of a family eager to establish a
renowned bed-and-breakfast. However, two obstacles stand in their
path to happiness. First, the bed-and-breakfast is in a remote
location far from the main highway. Second, and far more serious,
the few guests that check in, like roaches caught in a roach motel,
do not find their way out the next morning (this would seem like a
scenario straight from the Bates Motel, except for the accidental --
and sometimes hilarious -- nature of the deaths, not to mention the
burials themselves). The paterfamilias, desperate to preserve the
bed-and-breakfast's reputation, enlists his family's help in
ensuring that the bodies never again see the light of day. Then, the
sister, naïve and desperate in her search for love, begins dating a
man who claims to be Queen Elizabeth's nephew; he is, in fact, one
of Japan's Ten Most Wanted. All the while, the family takes time out
from their stress to indulge in post-burial song-and-dance routines
(even the corpses join in at one point). This wonderfully twisted
sensibility is "reformulated" and reinforced periodically through
surrealistic sequences of startling and wonderful clay animation for
good measure.
Unlike his experimentations with
the yakusa genre, which can sometimes into monotony
after the first hour or so despite the on-screen violence (or
perhaps because of it), the director has risen to a whole new level
of brilliant over-the-top madness with Happiness. In his
pre-screening speech, the director observed that Japanese audiences
didn't know what to make of the film at first. Maybe the thick layer
of high-octane irony on which the film rests is not a Japanese
tradition, but over here the film gives a whole new meaning to the
tired phrase "side-splitting comedy".
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