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Film: The Crimson Rivers
Release date: 26th November 2001
Certificate: 15
Running time: 101 mins
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Starring: Jean Reno, Vincent Cassel, Nadia Farès, Dominique Sanda, Karim Belkhadra
Genre: Crime/Mystery/Thriller
Studio: Sony
Format: DVD
Country: France
The Crimson Rivers (Les Rivières Pourpres), based on the best selling French novel of the same name by Jean-Christophe Grangé (who also co-wrote the screenplay) is an unabashed attempt to make a French Hollywood-style thriller.
A mutilated body, tied in the foetal position and missing both its eyes and hands, turns up high in the French Alps. Super detective Pierre Niemans (Reno) is called in to investigate, enlisting local glaciologist Fanny Ferreira (Farès) to help him understand the extreme conditions in which the body was found.
Meanwhile in the town of Sarzac, Detective Inspector Max Kerkerian (Cassel) investigates his own mystery, the desecration of a young girl’s tomb and apparent theft of her body. Kerkerian pursues the case, desperate to find any information he can about the girl, but somebody seems to be erasing her from history, and nobody is giving any answers.
The two cases soon become intertwined, and the reluctant duo team up to begin an unsettling tour of the local university, where everyone seems just a little too perfect, and the nearby town, where everyone seems the complete opposite. Something’s very wrong in this quiet mountain town, kept afloat by the all powerful university, but what Niemans and Kerkerian discover will horrify even these two hardened detectives…
The Crimson Rivers starts so well, an intriguing and atmospheric police story that unsettles initially with the gruesomely mutilated bodies, then, once the conspiracy begins, draws you in with a compelling plot.
Where The Crimson Rivers really excels is in its aesthetic department. As with La Haine, director Mathieu Kassovitz creates a striking visual aesthetic - a stunning pallet on which to play out his macabre tale, with blood red playing out against an overwhelmingly snow white landscape. The model effects of the mutilated corpses are unnervingly realistic, with the production team producing the grimmest representation they could - particularly during the opening credits, where the camera investigates and probes every minute detail of the first corpse.
The score is haunting and sits with the big budget aesthetics perfectly, recalling John Carpenter’s classic Halloween, so instantly recognisable as a chilling accompaniment to the horrific events being investigated.
Reno is perfectly cast as the constantly exhausted Commissaire Niemans. It seems Reno has become typecast as a cop, even within his native France, so he’s not really stretching himself. Vincent Cassel, at this time poised on the cusp of international superstardom, deliverers a frantic performance that runs in parallel to Reno’s slow and methodical Niemans. The pair truly gel together onscreen and are a joy to watch playing off each other’s opposite personalities. Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel carry the movie with their performances, but the plot unfortunately does descend into the realm of lunacy.
Thematically drawing heavily on the works of Fincher, De Palma and Hitchcock, The Crimson Rivers makes no apologies for its Hollywood influences, instead it revels in the style, but this sees the early promise descend into a run-of-the-mill Hollywood action movie. Cassel, for his part, is involved in perhaps the most bizarrely out of place scene in the film, a kung-fu battle between himself and a gang of skinheads. This scene, with its use of video game aesthetics, feels so superfluous to the film.
Another problem is that for all the interesting ideas and larger conspiracies alluded to, the film doesn’t deliver with its grand finale - a cop-out that leaves the viewer feeling short changed.
The Crimson Rivers is highly watchable as a popcorn police thriller. It’s just such a pity that the film is let down by its final third after producing an initially compelling plot line. CSA
Film: Audition
Release date: 28th June 2004
Certificate: 18
Running time: 111 mins
Director: Takashi Miike
Starring: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Jun Kunimura, Renji Ishibashi
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Studio: Tartan
Format: DVD
Country: South Korea/Japan
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly eleven years since Takashi Miike’s disturbing tour de force tore its way through the festival circuit and onto our screens. Yet more than a decade after its release, the director’s most infamous feature still holds the power to shake you to your very core.
Audition is based on Ryū Murakami’s cult novel of the same name, and focuses on widower Aoyama (Ishibashi) and his search for a new partner. Aoyama is urged by his son to begin dating again many years after the death of his wife, but fears starting the dating process again. Enter Aoyama’s video director friend Yoshikawa, who offers up the unethical idea of holding a fake movie audition in order for Aoyama to peruse many women at the same time.
Almost from the outset, Aoyama becomes smitten with 24-year-old former ballerina Asami Yamazaki (Shiina), and, after the audition, he finds the courage to ask her out on a date. The pair begin a romantic relationship, despite warnings about Asami from Yoshikawa, and Aoyama asks Asami to go away with him on a romantic weekend trip. Things are going well, until Asami disappears without a trace. This leads Aoyama on a nightmarish journey into a twisted underworld of abuse, torture and tragedy. Asami is not what she seems, and this culminates in the film’s final iconic scene…
With a back catalogue of over eighty films and television series’, it often feels like a lucky dip when picking out a Takashi Miike feature. Strike lucky, and you will receive a true cinematic gem, crafted with an unrivalled flare, constantly challenging the viewer in new ways, but on the other end of the spectrum, you find the mark of a director for hire, with some dire by-the-numbers titles padding out the ranks. Fortunately, Audition is the flag bearer for the former, the director’s calling card internationally, and constructed with a Hitchcockian approach that leads the viewer by the nose until the final shocking conclusion.
The film is a masterful deconstruction of the romantic comedy genre. We recognise the stock characters, the lonely lead who wants to be loved, the vulnerable girl whose personality needs to be coaxed out by romance, the woman who is hopelessly in love with the lead character much to his chagrin, and the best friend who acts as the enabler for the film’s plot. The archetypes are complimented by light-hearted music, snappy editing, a sharp script and rather slow pace at first. This all changes with the second half of the film, however, which takes great delight in taking the viewer on a surreal and ultimately horrific outing into the world of one very disturbed woman. That’s all we are saying about that as the second half of the film should really be left for the viewer to discover for themselves.
Audition is greatly aided by two fantastic performances from its leads, Ishibashi plays his role with warmth and compassion that completely draws you in as his quest becomes an increasingly bizarre scenario. It is this performance that holds the juxtaposition of styles in the film’s two halves together. Miike has designed the jolt in style in order to provoke a reaction but Ishibashi’s performance allows the film as a whole to flow together without turning the viewer off. Eihi Shiina gives the performance of a lifetime, too, and almost certainly without her Audition would never have obtained the reputation that it still holds today. Shiina is flawless as the innocently psychotic Asami striking fear into the hearts of many, evoking a feeling of abject horror that is not for those without a strong stomach.
Miike juxtaposes two different styles together in order to create a plane crash sized jolt to the viewer, but the film is more than just a mesh of two styles thrown together to shock and disgust. The film feels akin to a nightmare. Everything is fine, as in a regular dream, but then suddenly something happens, and you descend more and more into a horrific world that is out of your control. The film’s bouncing between orange tone and blue hue combined with the more surreal aspects of the film - dream sequences and hallucinations - only add to this sense of nightmarish helplessness that cannot be prevented.
Audition will always sit atop the pile of Takashi Miike’s films as his most lovingly detailed and nuanced film, despite many other outstanding contributions, such as Dead Or Alive and The Happiness Of The Katakuris, amusing given the film’s short production time, and being just one of a handful of films Miike was developing at the same time.
Audition is a must see for any fan of Japanese extreme/horror cinema. It has earned its reputation, and next to Oldboy should be considered the cornerstone of modern East-Asian extreme cinema. CSA
