Monday, March 23, 2015

Sôseiji aka Gemini (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1999)


“I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.”

“I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. “

“...it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”
- from the modern Hippocratic Oath


I am restricted from telling too much about Sôseiji. That would be robbing the film of its mysteries. It may have to suffice that you know it's a Grimm's Fairy Tale of a film about a doctor who may not survive a meeting with his doppleganger. Is the doppleganger real? A ghost, a mental aberration...an act of God? A figure of punishment, or one of redemption? The first time I saw Gemini, I didn't know whether what was happening onscreen was meant to be taken at face value. I guessed wrong.

It is 1910 as the Meiji Era nears a close, and Yukio is settling into his life at home after attending the wounded in the Russo/Japan War. Yukio has earned the trust and accolades of his peers and his community. He is nothing if not respectable, and highly civilized in his parents' image. They have made him the man he is, from his father's ethics to his mother's deepseated bigotry toward the poor.

Yukio has a wife, Rin. Rin was once a patient, having been rescued after a fire and suffering from amnesia. There's no love lost between Rin and the parents: she is acceptable charity. Something about her bothers Yukio's mother, but Rin remains just this side of objectionable. Lucky for Yukio, or he wouldn't have the spine to love her. All told, Yukio has a very comfortable life. A respectable life.

Even so, Yukio is uneasy. He's bothered by matters of conscience regarding the oath he took as a physician, and he senses he's being watched by someone outside the household which doubles as his clinic.

Not long after he makes a critical decision Yukio meets his twin, who promptly throws him down a dry well. The double assumes Yukio's identity and begins to rehabilitate the doctor's image all the while keeping Yukio alive to torment him.

More of the plot than that I won't tell. To be honest I'm still studying the film. Aspects of it have gone unexamined as I've just now gotten a grasp on the triangle at the heart of the film. 



Director Tsukamoto is again working for-hire but unlike with Hiruko the Goblin this time he makes something personal to himself of a short story by Edogawa Rampo. Gemini unfolds with all the logic of a fable, depending on ironies as tragic as they are unlikely and on outrageous twists of fate. Leaving Tokyo behind with all its cold surfaces, everything else opens up from the claustrophobic to the lush and open: a rural village setting of trees and rivers, homes of ascetic formal beauty and tranquility, slums filled with color-bedecked survivors who entertain for scraps. The director's visual palette is given free voice to soar with natural colors, and bold lighting: cold white floods, sunset oranges, purples, greens. It's one of Tsukamoto's most beautiful movies to look at. The natural world suits him and he should go there more often.

The first time we see the double, he appears as a wraith from Japanese lore, a savage storm of colorful rags and pelts. It's one of the movies most memorable moments as he poses and cartwheels like an actor in a more traditional Japanese stage drama. Gemini is a stylistic melange on other levels as well, from lighting to costumes. For sound, Chu Ishikawa's driving industrial beats are traded for creepy disjointed vocals and a delicate piano lament. 



Tsukamoto is often compared to David Cronenberg for the body horrors of Tetsuo and Videodrome. I think the comparison between these two directors has never been so appropriate as here, though for a different reason. Cronenberg's cinema has always been concerned with the mutability of identity. Tssukamoto has always focused on hidden sides to the psyche, identities repressed. Rin still fulfills that function in Gemini, but what the fates have in store for Yukio and his doppleganger go well beyond his usual obsession with releasing inner furies. Rin herself is a puzzlebox, cautiously letting us in on her own journey of identity shifts a little at a time. Rin and Yukio share that in common, both base their identities on fear of society's judgment.

One of the most rewarding things about Tsukamoto's work is that there is always something new to discover on further viewings. For example, an important aspect of Sôseiji is the ways in which the director contrasts the life of poverty with that of privilege. I should be writing about that but I'm barely beginning to see that facet of the movie myself. Until now I've still been sorting out the dynamics of the central characters (the M-F-M triangle again).

I will dare to say that the fairy tale tone of Sôseiji allows Tsukamoto to give full unabashed voice to his humanism for the first time, but ya know what? I'm still guessing. The final sequence of shots are still ambiguous enough to make me wonder whether the lesson has been learned. I prefer to think that it has.

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