Sinister Ash

Can anyone explain the ending of audition by takeshi miike?

I don't understand what's reality and what's dream.....

Big Guy

That's the idea!!!

The drugs she gives to him blur the line between whats real and what isn't.....Plus the pain of what she was doing to him probably made his mind wander too!!!!!!!

Giles

yeah it made my brain wander too, straight to a quick cat nap. I thought this movie was a little overhyped and the film plodding.

Slumbering Fist

I think that is one of the things I liked about Audition. I hate endings that wrap everything up into a nice tidy ball. Its much creepier not knowing for sure exactly what Asami's true story was.

JaxComet

Somebody please post a spoiler of what she does to him.....

Slumbering Fist

Stuart Livesly

I took it that he felt so entirely strange about his whole way of meeting her, and by trying to make up an excuse to go out with her, and how she asks him to love her only (which is hard since he's been through so much) that part of his mind feels guilty about taking advantage of her. That's why he's created this backstory that makes her as predatory as he. But since he's made up this whole story, he tries to give it a semi-happy ending.

blessthemess

Sum unsettling bits that makes our minds wander....

1. the 1st third of the film was about how ordinary this guys life was.... In fact, we found out he's a good man, good husband, good father.... And all he wants is a lil loving for all the love he dishes out. What he gets in return for all this good karma?


Makes u wonder doesn't it?


(more)

GeoffK

Just saw this last night. Wow... Can't say that I'll be rushing to see it again.

Hey am I the only one that thinks it sounds like she's saying" 'Kittie kittie kittie' when she's doing the stuff to him at the end? I know the subtitles say it translates to 'deeper...deeper...deeper' but I couldn't help but think it sounded like 'Kittie kittie kittie"

Cornfed

I thought the exact same thing when I watched it. Apparently my cat doesn't agree with us as she didn't come running into the room.

MiK

I didn't see the movie yet but I think "Kiri Kiri Kiri" (especially in that context) translates better as "Cut Cut Cut", not "Deeper Deeper Deeper"...

Stuart Livesly

Even more messed up that that? I saw this one night with my girlfriend and we creeped each other out by saying "kittie kittie kittie" and then the next day we say Monsters Inc. in which the little girl calls the John Goodman character "Kitty!"

Now whenever I think of one, I Pavlovianly think of the other.

Gambit

OK, so I finally got around to picking up this movie and am confused with the ending as well.



It's ok to leave the movie with unanswered questions and an air of mystery. But you need to at least lay out the info that the audience can piece together logically and come up with some sort of hypothesis. Or am I missing something?

Jah-Wren Ryel

Since the title of this thread is "the ending - huh?" it is clearly a spolier thread, so I'm not going to bother figuring out what parts of the following are spoilers and what parts aren't...

I thought it was relatively clear. The "flashbacks" during the torture session are fictitious because if they had really happened, he would have known from them just how effed up the girl was and would not have let the relationship proceed the way it did. The girl has abandonment issues, to put it mildly. Keeping the previous boyfriend in the sack is her way to make sure that he never leaves her, in any way at all. I forget the exact lines of dialogue, but she expresses those fears of abandonment to the main character a couple of times. In at least one case, it almost sounded like the regular "love me for ever" stuff that girls like to say, but given the context of her psychosis it totally explained why she kept the last guy around in the sack and pretty much covered why she came to torture the main character.

Thrawn_VA

Yes, I agree with the statement by Jah-Wren. On the previous edition there was a Miike commentary and if I remember what he said is was some of the scenes were sort of repeated because one set was what she was really like (crazy) and the other as what he imagined her to be (the ideal woman). However, Miilke likes the audience to interpret his movies.

Also he did talk about the "kiri kiri" sound and it doesn't mean "deeper" in Japanese. That sound actually has no meaning and was just sort of a cute sound she was making to cover up the screams and whatnot.

DrGerbil

Why not?

The ending makes me cringe, but it's perfection... truly!

mapson

Add me to the list of people who didn't like the film. Saw it and thought it was at best an average film. Even with all the praises from others, it didn't do anything for me. I don't mind films that leave imagination to the ending but this one was a complete mess. It felt like the original director left the set and I was brought in to piece it together and finish the filming.

DrGerbil

There's a list now? Oh, wait, you mean the Threadcrapping list?

meritocracy

I've owned this for some time and originally saw it at a College screening. I loved it then and still do today. Miike films rarely cause half-hearted opinions, and this one's certainly no exception.

Gambit

Regardless of whether you liked or disliked the film, I would still like to get a reasonable interpretation of the ending. It sounds like most people are under the impression that the flashback scenes are imaginary. I agree with that. But does everyone also agree that it is from the guy's perspective? If so, how could he have imagined the experience in her apartment and the bag? He learned enough about her to know something wasn't quite right. But where did he get the info about the bag she had?

BuddhaWake

I don't think he actually learned anything about her, this along with his own insecurities about his love life and how they met etc. caused him to dream up a vision of what she was like before they met. All this was due to his own insecurities. I think that he was looking for an explanation or reason to whatever she mentioned about her past and he created his own sick story behind it which in itself conflicted with his own image of how she was the perfect woman. She was definately a little off but I believe that most everything we "learn" or see about her is made up of his own fears and hopes.

eXcentris

......

Jah-Wren Ryel

I agree with Gambit that there is something weird with the bag. We saw the bag early on, pre-dream sequence, when she was waiting for his phone call. So we can believe the bag man really exists. But he did not see it since he was not in that scene, yet it is not only in the dream-sequence but the bagman himself comes crawling out. My rationalization is that durnig the torture session, she said enough about it off camera to get the bagman into his hallucinations.

Richard Malloy

If I may say, I think some of you are getting a bit too caught up with making the events of the film conform to mundane reality, as though it were a conventional mystery or police procedural. This is a psycho-sexual horror film where the mundane and everyday are sharply contrasted against highly expressionistic images and moments of extreme surrealism. If it conforms to any sort of logic, it would only be that of her psychosis and his Freudian fears.

This is a film that ultimately conforms to what might be considered one ordinary man's deepest fear of the feminine... after all, what is he encouraged by friends, coworkers and his son to finally do after so many years of living the life of a mild, apparently asexual widower? To court a woman for the purpose of remarriage. But, as a result of this step, one that he finally worked up the courage to take (unfortunately for him, in a mildly deceitful way), his seemingly benign white lie plunges him into a nightmare of sadistic payback for all the sins of paternalism.

As for the meaning, it's basically a revenge picture. But with a twist. The character upon whom revenge is exacted is the one we identify with most. He seems a good sort, and the worst you can say about him is his tacit acceptance of Japanese paternalism and the deceitful-but-not-quite-devious method he adopts to find a wife. He seems a respectful and respectable sort, and yet the objectification of the "audition process" is obvious, not to mention his standards for what sort of person would make for a good wife (specifically, the passive and submissive sort who's dutiful, youthful, and talented but of course "not too talented"... all of which he initially takes Asami to be). Unfortunately for our hero, he selects a woman who's suffered the full brunt of unbridled male sexual violence. Her history of abuse has created an avenging angel against any sort of male bourgeois repression.

It's kinda funny that Miike, so often accused of mysogyny (and rightly so, at least on occasion) could make a film that not only posits the female character as ruthless avenger and that takes care to show her great delectation in the slow torture of basically an ordinary schlub who's worst crime is that he happens to embody some of the mildest, least objectionable male traits of Japan's modern patriarchal society... and yet still have us sympathize to a great extent with the female avenger!

I'm sure many of you have heard people trying to justify films like "I Spit on Your Grave" and "They Call Her One-Eye" as feminist revenge fantasies (as opposed to male rape fantasies). I think that's pretty dubious in those instances. Here, with regard to "Audition", I think it's right on the mark.

I'm sure some will blanche at my saying that "Audition" is an enlightened film that's sympathetic to the historically oppressed, or at least one that allows for the opportunity to reconsider Miike's reputation for mysogyny and sadism. But those familiar with the majority of his films know that Miike always seems to side with the oppressed, the weak, the outsider. Considered in that light, it isn't she who is the "villain", though we are hardpressed to apply that tag to him either as Miike makes it nearly impossible for us to feal anything but empathy for him. But like the figures who brutalized Asami as a child, personified by the frightfully leering dance instructor who assaulted her sexually and in other gruesome ways - and perhaps also those who dismissed, disrespected or otherwise disappointed her as an adult (the executive in the sack) - his villainy too lies in the unexamined, tacit acceptance of his culture's mores.

Gambit

I'm not debating the intention, style, or various undertones expressed in this film. I would just like further explanation on the bag and why I should buy into the fact that he has a hallucinatory sequence about it.

It seemed to me like a plot hole or something done intentionally for effect with the assumption that the audience would be too confused to notice it's a plot hole. Or there's something more to it, like that actually was a "real" sequence, in which case, someone please explain it to me.

Let's assume that there wasn't all of those imaginary sequences at the end. So nothing to confuse you about what's real, what's imagined, etc. He wakes up with her on top of him and he says,"Hey b*tch, you're not going to do to me what you did to that guy in the bag, are you?" (I'm just creating a simple example, not saying they would ever make the movie this way) I don't know of any way to justify him making this statement.