Visitor Q

I’ve never been a Nipponophile. I pick and choose the pieces of Japanese culture that interest me and leave the rest behind. However, I’m beginning to think that the Japanese culture fiends are onto something. Perhaps being bombed into the twentieth century has a funny way of setting you free from cultural limitations and promoting invention and creativity. Tonight I saw Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q. In 11 years he’s made 52 films according to IMDB. It’s clear from this movie he’s become quite skilled. This is certainly one of the best digital pieces I’ve seen. It’s also clear that he will never find a large audience because they don’t come much more extreme than this.

The movie opens with a title screen that says “Have you ever fucked your father?” Then goes right into a scene with a daughter seducing her father into paying for sex. They’re both filming it and taking stills as well. It concludes with her mocking him repeatedly, “Early bird,” and charging him extra because he came too quickly. Pile on violence, rape, necrophilia, lactation/urination, heroin addiction, dismemberment and people being hit on the head with a large rock and you’ve got some idea of the boundaries being pushed here. What makes it bearable is the element of humor that is carried throughout the movie. This isn’t like watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film “Salo” which features repeated child rape, fecal feasts and plenty of other perversions all wrapped up in an overbearing semiotics lesson about the evils of fascism. Miike has a sense of humor and realizes how extreme these situations are.

One might be tempted to label this as pornography because it sounds like it exists solely for the voyeur but it doesn’t. Take out some of the more extreme elements and you have a classic dysfunctional family like “The Royal Tenenbaums”, “The Ice Storm”, “A Boy’s Life”, “The Lion in Winter”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, etc. The plot is fairly conventional. It’s about a family that’s falling apart that is brought together by a strange visitor. Miike takes “Visitor Q” perhaps a step further than other films in the genre in that “the medium is the message.” The fact that it’s shot digital is important. In every scene we either see one of the characters taping the action, or we see the action straight from the camera in the actor’s hands. The father is a news reporter who detached from the world around him and only feels purpose when he’s taping. All the family members live their lives moderated by a video camera with meaning and purpose as disposable as a video tape. Change comes about when the visitor practices his destructive construction. Later on he takes the camera and the family members find themselves actually interacting with each other directly, albeit in their weird, extreme way.

I was throughly impressed by “Visitor Q.” It’s doesn’t resort to melodrama or a didactic family values message. It’s not filled with exposition with each family member boring us with their personal problems. On a technical level it doesn’t suffer from the bad editing, bad lighting or digital gimmicks that other DV movies run into. Sure, some DV can look incredibly good, “Things Behind the Sun” comes to mind but that’s because it looks like film. “Visitor Q” embraces the digital aesthetic and contributes a new voice to the world of movies. I sincerely hope that an American film maker reponds to movies like “Visitor Q” with a movie that has the same hearty vigor and inventiveness.