Audition – 1999 – Japan
I tried watching Audition a long time ago but quit because it was boring. Now, 20 years later, I kind of love it. Maybe I’m more mature now, or maybe I’m just more boring.
The premise of Audition is uncomfortable, but that’s probably the point. After his wife dies, a lonely television producer tries to meet women by organizing a fake audition for a TV show. He falls in love with a quiet woman named Asami who is much younger than him. It turns out that Asami is totally deranged, and she tortures and mutilates the television producer in a really hard to watch scene.
Audition is a slow, sparse movie. There isn’t much dialogue, and it’s full of awkward pauses that stretch on forever. Near its end, the narrative becomes very surreal. There are flashbacks and dream sequences, and it isn’t clear what is real and what is a hallucination.
There are lots of disturbing parts. Asami was physically (and probably sexually) abused as a child. Images of her being burned with hot pokers are particularly uncomfortable. As an adult, she is sadistic. She paralyzes a person with drugs and stabs his whole body with needles. She vomits into a dog food bowl and forces someone to eat it. She kills a cute dog.
The intent of Audition is ambiguous. Is Asami a sympathetic victim of her abusive upbringing or a cruel villain? The television producer who tricks her into a relationship is sleazy and unethical, but does he deserve to be tortured for it? I don’t know, and I don’t know if the movie really cares. Mostly, its intent is to be as dark and disturbing as possible.
The acting is pretty good in an understated way.
Rating: 7/10 Shrunken Heads
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