Friday, June 12, 2015

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2006)




Police investigate two cases, a young woman who has stabbed herself to death and a married man who has done the same. To Detective Sekiya the verdict is clear: suicide. Detective Kirishima isn't so sure. Shortly before their deaths both had called someone named '0'. The dead man's wife says that he was screaming for help in his sleep even as his arm, puppetlike, plunged a boxcutter at himself. The police chief decides that a psychic should be brought in to help locate '0'.

That psychic is Kagenuma, with the ability to enter other people's dreams. Kagenuma has never had a happy life. His mother feared and rejected him for his psychic gift. When he uses it, he sees nothing but other people's pain, their miseries, the darkest forgotten secrets that misshape their psyches. They come to him begging for his help, then resent him for what comes of it after he has endured their nightmares. Kagenuma would like for himself nothing better than oblivion and an escape from the company of others. 



Writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto has explored a number of disparate ideas over the course of his career, and now with his ninth feature release he draws most of them together in one film. Alienation and the deadening of the spirit have been a constant theme throughout his oeuvre, and suicide particular to Bullet Ballet and Vital (Vital especially explored the idea of suicide pacts). In recent films Tsukamoto's gaze had turned from the body itself to the inner essence (Vital, Haze). Suppression of memory to blot out pain was key to Vital and Haze both. ESP and the idea of shared psychic space between people (that is, people visiting each other's subconscious minds) appeared in Tetsuo: the Iron Man and resurfaced in Vital.

Tsukamoto himself plays '0', a more or less direct continuation of the morphing antagonist of Tetsuo and Tetsuo II, the man who has gone from seeking the destruction of his self to a perverse joy in the destruction of everyone and everything around him. '0' also is the more malevolent reflection of the instigator he played in A Snake of June.

Tsukamoto's films have a history of showcasing strong female characters. Those sensibilities are again put forward in Keiko Kirishima, the detective who presses Kagenuma to get involved in the case. She is new to the force, having been stationed a desk job with the police before now. Seeing her first dead bodies she has a hard time with the bloody aftermath. In a Tsukamoto film, squeamishness is a device like glasses were for Hitchcock: in the master's movies the wearing of glasses signified faulty moral vision. For tsukamoto, an inability to deal with blood, decay, etc. means a character who is not fully in touch with nature and often blind to something important in the story. Kirishima says that she asked for a transfer because she wants to do work that is more substantial, but we will learn later that it is more likely that an inner drive is seeking closer proximity with violence and death. Privately, Kirishima has been having her own series of nightmares in which she meets a wilder version of herself. 



All of this echoes the female protagonists of Tokyo Fist (Hizuru discovers her inner fury), A Snake of June (Rinko hides her true essence from herself), and Bullet Ballet (Chisato lives on the edge in search of self-destruction). And that brings us to the major problem with Nightmare Detective: Kirishima, not Kagenuma, is the central character here but she does not live up to Tsukamoto's heroines of his past efforts. Those characters were more fully developed and played by vibrant actresses. We've seen the likes before. The female cop who has to work harder than everyone else to prove herself equal to the men. Sad to say it's true to life, so the problem isn;t one of credibility. Unfortunately it's overly familiar – a cliché. Coming from a director renowned for his wild imagination establishes the movie on a disconcerting note. Compounding the problem, Ysukamoto has cast pop singer Hitomi in the lead, a decent actress of limited experience and without the range of his previous lead actresses. Kirishima doesn't resonate like Rinko, Hizumi, or Chisato.

I blame the premise of the movie. In tying together so much of his past work in one movie, this should be the Tsukamoto film to end them all, his crowning achievement. It is a good film, yet in sum it ends up one of his slighter works even as he brings his disparate strands together in one uniform piece. Weakening the piece substantially, these themes don't make themselves plain until late in the movie. In order to bring the audience to that point, Tsukamoto must take pains to build and support his premise. That takes the form of a standard police procedural, nothing like the fresh original storytelling the director is known for. We've seen criminal investigation movies of this flavor before, and coming from Tsukamoto it feels impersonal and uninspired. Nightmare Detective takes patience and probably multiple viewings before you see the real Tsukamoto in it. I didn't until I watched and reviewed his films in chronological order.

You can catch some sense of the director in the camera movements, like the nervous handheld shots. Here too, though, Tsukamoto departs from his usual tendencies. While he's still experimenting, true to his nature, this time his use of colors employs not gels and filters but digital manipulation with color timing and desaturation. Tokyo no longer seems a cold, sterile place to live, just another urban center with an alluring night presence. Chu Ishikawa tones it down as well, where an emotional montage is informed not by the director’s favored composer but by Erik Satie's Gymnopaedia.

I've always been fascinated by dreams and the dream experience, and the difficulty in recreating that experience on screen. Most directors fail – hell, most don't even try. I suspect they have never spent a moment recalling their own dreams, falling back on popular misconceptions (fill the screen with extravagant visuals, et voila). Have you ever noticed how in dreams you often know intuitively what a thing, person, or creature looks like even though you never actually see them? How would you convey that in a movie without heavy expositive dialog? In Nightmare Detective Tsukamoto has come close by creating elaborate nightmare creatures and then not letting us have more than shaky glimpses of what they might be. 



Repeating another motif of late is imagery of life in water, both fish and microscopic. In Nightmare Detective, water indicates the organic boundaries between the physical and spiritual, and between one consciousness and another. Kagenuma descends in and out of dreamastates and others' selves by sinking onto the keel of a sunken ship. We also see imagery of fish and microscopic life.

Preparing to enter someone else's dream state, Kagenuma dresses in a rain slicker, and beneath that pants and shoes he can easily slip out of. It's a psychological trick, helping him find the right mental state by shedding encumbrances. The rain slicker looks a bit like a cape – echoing the visual cue from M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable but much more amusing as a jab at superhero costumes.

Tsukamoto can also be found in a visual motif that recurs from Vital, an act of mutual asphyxiation between two characters seeking oblivion together. This is not erotic asphyxiation, but shared hopelessness. Both films trade in depression without solving it. In Nightmare Detective, one character finds his depression linked to a buried childhood trauma while another who suffers looks into her own past and finds abundant joy. How did they both end up in the same place? It's the mystery that preoccupies Tsukamoto's movie.

Nightmare Detective is the first in a trilogy proposed by Shinya Tsukamoto. To date he has yet to begin production on the third film.

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