An Obsession (Tsumetai chi, 1997)

Aoyama Shinji

Japan

109 min, color, Japanese (English subtitles)

Almost every review of this film I have read insists that this is a remake of Kurosawa's Stray Dog. I don't know how many of said reviewers have seen that film, but let me tell you one thing: aside from a detective losing his gun, there is nothing that the two films have in common. Absolutely nothing. Kurosawa's detective was wracked by guilt and continued the pursuit of the killer even as he came to realize just how many similarities there were between them and just how easily they could have ended up in each other's shoes. Superficially, a similar "identification" seems to happen here, but that's just it; it only seems that way, and the point of the film is rather different.

Mita kills the cult leader Waiting in the hospital

There is not much to story that cannot be quickly summarized here. Detective Sosuke (Ishibashi Ryo) is married to Rie (Nagashima Eiko) but in reality his work is his mistress. He is a dedicated cop who prefers to go on a stake-out even on his day off instead of staying at home with her. But that night, his life is about to undergo a traumatic change. A cult leader suspected in the disappearance of several women is shot dead by the distraught husband of one of the missing women, and when Sosuke attempt to capture the killer, he is shot in the lung too. Upon waking up in the hospital, Sosuke suddenly realizes that his work has lost any meaning for him, and that the most painful thing is to find that it is his friend Yukio (Suwa Taro) who has kept the vigil next to his bed rather than Rie who has left him, finally having gotten fed up with his neglect. His most pressing concern is to find a way to prove his love to his estranged wife. Mere protestations of it will not do.

Shimano collapses in pain Sosuke has lost the will to work

A random event connects Sosuke to a man in a similar predicament. As the detective was lying bleeding in the tunnel after getting shot, a stranger walked up to him and took his gun. Getting a gun is next to impossible in Japan, and this should have been a big deal for Sosuke, as it is for his colleague, but he does not care. Even when the unknown man begins to murder people with it, he still does not care, and any attempt to draw him back into the force to help with the pursuit just drives him further away. Sosuke visits with the man who shot him who is now in custody. It is during this brief talk with Shigeki that he realizes what he must do for there is a strange parallel between them. The cult apparently "steals" women, and Shigeki deranged from the loss of his wife, has murdered its sinister leader. In other words, this is the desperate act of a man whose purpose in life, whose love, has been taken away. But Shigeki believes that his wife has returned to him, and can now die content. Sosuke realizes that he must get his own wife back, and so he decides to find the man, recover the gun on his own, hoping that this will somehow free him to return to normal life.

Why did you shoot me? The strange altar or love and communism

As he digs deeper, he finds out that the thief is one Shimano (Suzuki Kazuma), a man dying of leukemia in an excruciatingly painful way. He has contracted the disease from his mother who got it from the atomic bomb at Hiroshima (this is important). Shimano needs huge dollops of morphine just to get through the day, and he has left his girlfriend Kimiko (Toyama Kyoko) with whom he is obsessively in love (he even has a shrine dedicated to her in his apartment) and who is obsessively in love with him. In fact, she loves him so much that she cannot bear the separation and begs him to kill her instead. So far he has demurred.

Trapped like a bird in a cage The obsession with Kimiko

The brush with death has left the detective without desire for life. It's not that he wants to end his existence, he just does not care. His world is empty, he is a nihilist, and he needs to redeem himself through love. Shimano, on the other hand, desperately wants to live but knows that he cannot. So he will make the ultimate sacrifice and affirm his life, whose meaning is provided by his love for Kimiko, by committing suicide rather than wither away. He follows an elaborate ritual, sacrificing people in a pattern that makes for the communist star on the city map, until he is ready to complete it. Ritual love suicides have a long tradition in Japanese art (see, for example the superb Double Suicide or read Love Suicide at Amijima), and this part that is usually shocking to a Western audience is well in keeping with tradition, at least in art.

Posing for the arts Gratuitous shot of Toyama Kyoko (Kimiko)

So now we have three people with analogous problems. Shigeki, whose love is stolen by the cult; Sosuke, whose love is stolen by his work; and Shimano whose love is stolen by his disease. Each must fight to take back his love and his life. Shigeki kills the cult leader and then commits suicide, he has gone to join his apparently murdered wife, and he has died happy. But things are not that easy for Sosuke and Shimano, who are both weak and just cannot bring themselves to do what is necessary. Their shared weakness is underscored by having them both suffer physically. Leukemia is usually detected when there is a shortage of red blood cells (anemia). These are the cells that carry oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body, so Shimano is not just in pain, he is physically weak because he gets too little oxygen. Sosuke was shut in the lung, so every little exertion causes him pain and shortness of breath for the same reason. They both find it hard to do anything more strenuous than a leisurely walk. They are both tired.

What would it feel like? I know where he is

And then it all falls into place: as Shimano nears completion of his ritual, he has gained enough strength for the double suicide. It is as if taking lives would make it seem more bearable. Killing Kimiko will free her and killing himself would cheat the disease that has taken his future forever. But he cannot finish it unless Sosuke lets him, and to do this the detective must overcome his own prior dedication to the principles of police work. In other words, Sosuke must free himself from his own shackles. This he finally does when he resolves to allow Shimano to finish what he has started.

The Sagas still love each other You have found the pattern

Although Sosuke must repudiate his prior life-as-work in order to gain Rie, it is a huge step that needs to be explained. Why does he turn away from the law? He not only fails to help his friend and his boss find the killer (and thus indirectly causes the deaths of the people Shimano will sacrifice) but actively hinders them (breaks his friend's leg so he can't follow him). Why? There is a long-winded discussion of the difference between the law (which is solely concerned with facts) and truth (which is always to the left or to the right of the facts). Being empty inside, the Sosuke is in search for something that will fill in the void, much like the main character in Vian's love story Foam of the Daze. It cannot be facts for they are meaningless and grotesque, even repulsive. So he will search for "truth," and he will use the killer and his lover's definition of it: love made real by an ultimate sacrifice. For Shimano and Kimiko, this sacrifice is death, but for Sosuke, it is the rejection of his work. In the end, Sosuke comes to realize that one can have love without dying, and the way to prove it to Rie is to spend his life with her in friendship. Perhaps Shimano would have loved to do that, but this method is closed to him: he cannot spend his life in friendship with Kimiko because he will die soon anyway, and it will be the guys in anti-radiation suits that kill him.

I am sorry I have to break your leg The final journey

This brings me to the guys in anti-radiation suits who bizarrely ride around in a jeep totting automatic weapons and seemingly randomly murder people while nobody seems to pay any attention to them. The person who did the commentary on the DVD says that their presence is left unexplained in the film but this is not so. Recall that Shimano is dying of leukemia, whose efficient cause was the atomic bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. The killers in the anti-radiation suits are symbols of the sickness that stalks its victims and then murders them when their time is up. We first see them in the initial scene when Shimano has just walked away from a food cart. As he slowly makes his way down the dark street, the jeep passes him and the stops. One of the men turns around and stares at Shimano, and then nods as if to say, "Yes, that's him. His time will come, though not yet." And then they drive off. Shimano will not allow them to murder him. He will cheat the preordained, and therefore meaningless, death by taking his own life in the service of something grander, and will thus give meaning to his existence and his end. In the final scene, Sosuke sees the jeep again and attempts to shoot the guys in it but of course he cannot do it: even though they are real to some (after all, they do kill people), they remain unreal and out of reach. They cannot be stopped, only cheated.

Preparing for the love suicides Shooting at an abstraction

The DVD from ArtsMagic is nicely packaged, with an audio commentary and an interview with the director. However, the presentation is not the best I have seen them do. The picture is somewhat unstable, with colors washed out, and contrast so high that there is virtually no detail in the highlights. They also seem to have dropped the ball on the sound, which is murky and even disappears between scenes. It's not too bad because we don't lose any of the dialogue but it is distracting. Still, if one wants to see this slow-moving thoughtful film, this DVD is the way to go. I did not much care for the commentary (which I did not listen to in its entirety), and I think it will be better to enjoy the film without it.

October 31, 2005


Why did you shoot me?	The strange altar or love and communism