“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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