A creative movie nowadays is one that doesn't have to fall into the trend of giving movies "not much dialogue, no story, incomplete or vague endings" (such as Audition, The Return, 2046, Brown Bunny, and Broken Flowers) to avoid being considered "Hollywood." It's at the same level that Hollywood films feel they have to give a "twist ending." Bad Indie/underground films fall back into this "vague ploy." Bad Hollywood films fall back into this "twist" ploy. It's all just a poor excuse for amatuer directing and bad writing...Miike likes to shock and Kar-Wai likes to bore - that's the theme in their movies...

He did not know about the bag. The hallucination is his imagination of the acts Asami must have committed, based on his detective work earlier. The man crawling out of the bag (suggested to be Shibata the record producer) is missing both feet, an ear, a tongue, and 3 fingers. When he was investigating at the bar where she was supposed to work, a neighbor tells him that the owner was murdered one year prior and that the body had been chopped to bits, scattered all over the bar. But when the police gathered all the parts, they found an ear, a tongue and 3 fingers too many.

And Audition isn't really a revenge film, or a horror film or a suspense film. It's a character study of two lonely souls searching for happiness, which is a main theme in Miike's films. The two people here representing the principle that one human being can never really know or understand another.

Also, while there is sexism in the film, mainly from Aoyama's friend Yoshikawa, and it's easy to view it as a feminist film or to interpret Asami as an angel of vengeance, I think it's a mistake because things don't quite add up. Her actions are not motivated by an ideological agenda, and she's is not portrayed as the representative of the whole gender, simply as a individual with a troubled history. And she lies and deceives as much, if not more, than Aoyama. Moreover, the function of Asami as a feminist symbol is undermined by the fact that she killed her female manager in the bar when she worked. She doesn't torture Aoyama because he's a male chauvinist pig (which he isn't) supposed to represent the gender, she tortures him because she is convinced that he doesn't only love her. And while there are examples of sexism in the film, they are never used as a basis for judgment, but merely as an example of how people misunderstand others.

I think that's a very insightful take on the film, eXcentris, and though it's contrary to mine, I don't disagree with you.

I agree in that I don't believe Asami has an ideological/political agenda - and I don't believe she ever became aware of Aoyama's mild deceptions nor his desire for an "infantilized" woman - but I think the film makes it somewhat evident that her history of abuse is the reason for her aversion to male authority figures, be they teacher, employer, husband, etc., and the nature of the abuse of her as a child is somehow being paid back through the highly ritualized tortures she inflicts on those she perceives as rejecting her or otherwise harming her.

And, likewise, Aoyami's desire for a mild, submissive, "talented but not too talented", infantilized woman for a bride - that is, a wife that respects his authority as would a child - is certainly derived from the traditional paternalism of, in this instance, Japanese society (certainly no different than Western society paternalism). And, lest we forget, the deceitful means he employs to find a spouse who's personal characteristics meet these retrograde notions of femininity is little more than pure objectification. I don't think the underlying social commentary is unintended here.

So, without question I agree with you that this is a character study revolving around two lonely souls and their search for happiness, but that hardly discounts the political/ideological elements, or Miike's social critique of Japanese paternalism. In short, the characters do not have to recognize and acknowledge the political/ideological dimensions, that is, they need not be self-aware regarding their motivations or aware of their relation to society as a whole, for these to nonetheless be apparent and intended critiques of the film.

In fact, I'd argue that social commentary is better achieved in drama by characters who lack this self-awareness, as we see in their actions and attitudes the defects of ideology or culture. Characters who are self-aware in this regard often become mere cyphers for the author, a handy conduit through which to spout a particular POV. Or worse: the case of a character who becomes self-aware in the course of the drama, leading to the inevitable, earnest to the point of cringe-worthy "we've learned something here today" spiel!

Don't get me wrong, the underlying socio-political commentary about paternalism in japanese society is indeed there and Asami does exact revenge because she was submitted to a life of abuse by men. I guess what I'm trying to say is that to view this film primarily as a revenge film based on sexism an/or feminism is incorrect even if there are such elements present. It is primarily a film about outcasts (another favorite theme of Miike) trying to find happiness but who hit a wall of misunderstanding. The perceived sexism (which is indeed there) being used as the main tool through which to illustrate that these two human beings will never understand each other.

The paternalist, mysoginistic attitude is mostly apparent in Yoshikawa, who serves as a contrast to Aoyama. He claims that "Japan is finished because there are no more good woman". This also makes him one of Japan's lonely people, deeply pessimistic about love and relationships. But the audition was his idea and Aoyama only goes along with it reluctantly. And his suggestions and advice always go against Aoyama's instincts and beliefs. In an earlier scene where Aoyama eats fish with his son he asks whether the specimen is male or female. The son replies he could clearly see the ovaries when the fish was cut open. Aoyama then replies:"I don't know much about ovaries". This establishes the first of many misunderstandings the men in this film have about the opposite sex.

I agree with you about self-awareness in characters. It mostly leads to not so subtle sermonizing about morality. Look! Here's the message! Blah...

I just took it to be an outer body flashback sequence. You hear about people who are close to death having outer body experiences: I just took it to be along the same lines except that in his case it was because he was drugged up.

Richard, I like your take on it, it reminds of me of an exchange from Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces between an extremist and a bourgeois (paraphrased):

B: But I've never been involved in politics!
E: And that is exactly why we are going to kill you.

The Audition dream vs reality debate is one of my favorite topics. So often discussed that I have a canned response...

My read is that all of the mutilation is a dream, regardless of what Miike says on the commentary (he makes so many films a year, they're probably just a blur to him anyway). The dreaming begins from the moment they fall asleep in the "blue room" through to the end, with the exception of the "awakening interlude." This explains a lot of events that are question marks in the film, and reinforces some interesting themes.

Shigeharu is a lonely man. He's embarassed about his shyness and inability to meet women. He falls in love with someone he knows almost nothing about, and the dangers of doing so are pointed out to him by his son and his best friend. His conscience nags him about meeting his potential bride through a grand deception. He may even be fearful of the sudden intimacy and neediness of his new partner.

Disregarding the brief moments in Asami's apartment early in the film, Asami is nothing more than what she presents herself to be - a sweet, shy, emotionally fragile young woman. The creepy scenes in her apartment with the bagman can be explained as Shigeharu's imagination running away with itself, since they always occur when he is alone and thinking about her.

When he falls asleep with her in the blue room, he has a walloping dream that is equal parts abandonment fantasy, paranoia-induced terror and guilt trip. Notice how the evenly paced tone of the film shifts suddenly when Shigeharu is awakened by a mysterious call from the bellhop (a freak straight from David Lynch central casting). Why would a person as needy and clinging as Asami abandon Shigeharu in the middle of the night? Because Shigeharu is now in the depths of a protracted nightmare. Contrary to those who believe that until he drinks the drink the film is depicting "reality," for me, the film goes off the rails much earlier.

His dream fills in the backstory of Asami, explaining the gaps in his knowledge in the most disturbed way possible. The scars on her legs are from a relative's abusive torture. Her ballet career has seedy overtones. No one can contact her former employer because she cut him to pieces and keeps him in a sack in her dank apartment. Her emotional neediness causes her to commit the cruelest acts of violence.

During the surreal sequence after he drinks the drugged whiskey, we are provided with information about Shigeharu we didn't get before, and a different picture of him emerges. We see additional moments from his date with Asami, and he is revealed to be so smitten that he can't listen to her. She reveals uncomfortable details about her past - he becomes restless and doesn't know how to react. He will never know her, because he is hung up on his image of her - her youth, beauty, and servility. He praises her, but doesn't want to hear anything about the unseemly details of her life. We see that he wants her, but there is no basis for a real relationship between them. The movie is very cagey about what it reveals and when it reveals it, which shows it has more going on than just shock and horror. Later, we find that the sad woman in his office who stares longingly at him is not just a potential romantic interest he has overlooked - she is an employee he took sexual advantage of, then rudely shunned.

I think the movie is about male paranoia in intimacy, about how people can entertain the darkest suspicions about others instead of reflecting on their own behavior. The moment when Shigeharu awakes from the torture dream to discover himself again in the blue room with Asami, both he and the viewer are relieved and terrified. It was just a dream, but how can he look at Asami the same way again? Who's the monster in this bed? The deceived, needy woman, or the man who pursues needy women, and then recasts them as demonic harpies?

This is a film written and directed by men. The "evil" Asami is a projection of these men, and by making her real, the film loses tension - its message can devolve into "Women are bitches, don't be intimate, don't trust them, look what happens." I know that is partly overstatement since Asami remains a sympathetic figure (even after she commits the most horrible acts), but in a film that bases its premise on gender, it's something to take into account.

A weakness of the "reality" scenario is that the immoral actions of Shigeharu become the lesser of two evils. We view his torture as an extreme punishment for a minor transgression. In the "dream" scenario, Shigeharu's punishment is self-punishment, which is a more psychological, Poe-like angle that I prefer.

If the torture is real, and the "awakening interlude" is a fantasy, why wouldn't he fantasize a happier scenario, rather than one in which Asami pledges her love while he lies terrified next to her? His actions in that scene seem more like someone who's awakened from a terrible dream, than someone who has escaped into fantasy. He then falls back asleep, and his dream continues. I have awoken from terrible dreams, then fallen back to sleep to "resolve" them, so this return to the torture scenario is not implausible to me.

The first time I saw the film, I was a little frustrated by the switching back and forth, and saw it as mere gamesmanship. But on repeat viewings, the structure of the film becomes a little clearer, and I have more and more respect for it.

No one will ever "get to the bottom" of Audition. That's what makes it brilliant, and why people will be talking about it for many years. Its combination of supporting multiple interpretations plus Miike's unparalleled talent for pushing people's buttons make it quite a head trip. If you can't stand paradox and unsolved mystery in film, Audition is probably not for you. And neither is Donnie Darko, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Eraserhead, or a whole bunch of other great films. Better stick to old episodes of Dragnet: "Just the facts, ma'am..."

The closest I have seen Miike coming to a film of Audition's depth is his segment "Box" from Three... Extremes (which is getting a US release Oct 28). Although I must confess, I haven't seen all his films... then again, has anyone besides Tom Mes?

ehonauer, I agree completely with your take on the film as I tried to convey above although not as eloquently and detailed as you have done. We need to understand that all we see and understand of her is through his eyes. The audience knows as much as he does about her, and as you said, he's not really interested in hearing anything that might deter from the ideal image that he created.

First of all, phew! Not only is your take a great psycho-social analysis, but a fantastic bit of writing to boot. Looking at the whole latter-half of the film as a projection of his latent guilt is not only a plausible reading, but one that's much more interesting to me than "merely" the political angle.

But I quoted what I did above because there seem to be philistines afoot in these parts who cannot fathom that a work of art often cannot be reduced to a single, intended meaning, and that an artist may work from intuition and extreme subjectivity without first understanding how every element fits to form a singular, hermetically-sealed, preordained whole. And, more than that, working in a manner and in the hope that the finished whole cannot be reduced to such a singular interpretation. Not "weird for the sake of weird" - though certainly there are works of little merit that are little more than deliberately obtuse - but I mean instead a work that's open-ended, unrestrained to a single perspective, and defying any attempt at a simple reductive gloss. Such films remain vibrant, defying either the dustbin of pop-culture detritis or the moldering tomb of the museum.

This is what allows a work of art a life, the promise that it may remain ever fathomless and fascinating, possessing the capacity to allow each of its viewers a subjective, highly personal experience augmented or limited only by that person's personal experience/lack thereof. It's the same attribute that allows us as individuals to experience a work of art at an early point in our lives, and then to experience it again very differently at a later point. It's the same work, but we are different.

All of which is old hat when it comes to high art, but what's especially interesting here is that we're talking about popular entertainment, and even more specifically a ghettoized genre film. The old high/low distinction was blown out of the water last century, if not before, but in the traditionally conservative world of cinema (conservative perhaps most of all due to the extraordinary expense of making a film as opposed to writing a poem or applying paint to canvas) - in this traditional environment, films tended more to be either high art in the classical sense or empty-calorie entertainment. And, unfortunately, this seems more true today than ever. This is why Miike fascinates so many of us, and (early) Wong Kar-Wai as well, as they seem to be carrying forward the spirit of such past masters as Godard, Fuller, Fassbinder, early Scorsese, and all the other iconoclastic "pop artists" whose work has proved so lasting and significant.

Because she's a deeply disturbed woman who, after a life of abuse, has finally let a man make love to her. She now claims this man as her own and her obsession is now that he will only love her. At this point, he realizes that he knows absolutely nothing about her and starts to investigate, while she does the same thing by breaking into his home where she discovers the photo of his late wife on his desk. For her, this is paramount to treason. Both characters use lies and deceit and both misunderstand each other, which again I feel is the main theme of Audition.

Another reason I don't subscribe to ehonaur's interpretation that Aoyama's fear of intimacy makes him invent the dark Asami is because it doesn't fit with his character. I would have believed it from his friend Yoshikawa, because he's the chauvinist one who believes that "there are no good women in Japan anymore". So the "this woman is too nice to be true, there must be something wrong with her" argument would make sense in his case. But Aoyama truely believes that he can find a good woman. He's so lonely and desperate for a companion that he fools himself into believing that Asami is the one, despite his son and his friend's warnings, and despite the fact that he knows absolutely nothing about her. It's only when she leaves in the middle of the night after they made love that he starts getting suspicious.

But as you guys said, it's fun to discuss the many possible interpretations of the film.

Everyone's analysis of this film is very insightful and each has very good points. However, I guess most people are able to gloss over the one sticking point (the bag) that I cannot.

For the most part, the audience knows exactly what Aoyama knows. With the one glaring exception of revealing to the audience Asama in her apartment with the bag. We have gained some insight that he doesn't have. And while we can try to justify him imagining it by saying he came up with it through his detective work, that is still somewhat of a stretch.

If that initial scene of the bag were left out, then it would make more sense.

Thanks everybody for the kind words. It's great to see a discussion about a controversial movie with each respecting the other's differing opinon!

I say the first scene with Asami in her apartment with the bag is completely imagined by Shigeharu. He's having a paranoid fantasy based on his friend's and son's warnings about the unknown. When he visits the club and learns of the mutilation murders, he's actually asleep with Asami in the blue room, dreaming. When he's in Asami's apartment and the "bagman" finally appears, he's still asleep with Asami in the blue room, dreaming. All of it is consistent, because it has all sprung from his own imaginings that are becoming increasingly detailed and disturbing.

One of the reasons I interpert the film as I do is because it's the only one I've come to that rationally explains *all* of the film's contradictions. Otherwise, you have to fall back on a "well, it's a surreal movie, so not everything is going to make sense" position. There's nothing wrong with that approach, either. I have a friend who believes that Asami transmitted the memory of the bagman to Shigeharu psychically when they slept together!

Unfortunately, I can't buy into this theory because at this point in time, he doesn't really know enough about her. He doesn't know that she's excessively needy and waiting for his call. And he hasn't learned enough about her to somehow come up with the idea of her having a bag with something alive in it.

Yup, which is exactly why I don't buy into this explanation either. Ehonauer's theory might offer an explanation to all the film's contradictions but in order to do this, you have to buy that the characters are now doing or imagining things which do not fit their psychological profile. In a word, by eliminating what appear to be plot holes/contradictions, you create character contradictions. I'd rather live with the former than the later.