AUDITION

A wealthy widower, on his son's advice, decides to remarry. With the help of a friend who works in the film industry, he will stage an audition to find his soulmate: he will find a girl, kind, shy, and well-mannered, perhaps too much, who hides a terrible secret! "Audition" is an "author" film, a seemingly slow film that might bore the average viewer, but it is a well-made film that presents us with the solitary and melancholic figure of the widower looking for a new companion. Once again, an Eastern film addresses the problem of loneliness: even a hyper-technological and modern society like Japan suffers from a lack of affective feelings, as was already the case in "Kairo" ("Pulse") by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The director of "Audition" is Takashi Miike, who treats his film with refinement: in the first part (perhaps a bit too long) that might make the film a "dramone," the figure (I would say positive) of the protagonist, sad and alone, is presented, for whom it is inevitable to feel both compassion and sympathy at the same time; then the girl with a kind appearance and a good and melancholic soul is introduced, for whom it is impossible not to feel a sense of empathy, given also the tortures she suffered as a child. Miike's genius can be particularly felt in the second part of the film, a short part compared to the first but one that undoubtedly shocks the viewer and leaves them dazed. The merit of the film is, in my opinion, the ambiguous ending: we do not understand if the strong scenes we witnessed (the torture with the wire is crazy/brilliant/sick, the idea of the bag is at least unsettling) are the product of our protagonist's imagination, perhaps convinced of having won the girl in a dishonest way (a fake audition), or perhaps it is reality; we do not understand if the reserved girl is a possessive maniac or if it is just the protagonist's nightmare, we only understand that she is an unfortunate girl, who has suffered a lot because of the cruelty of the men she has met. Or perhaps (overcome with remorse) our widower only had to deal with the ghost of his deceased wife? These are the questions left after watching the film: probably "Audition" is a film that needs to be watched more than once to fully grasp its real meaning. The second "hallucinogenic" part is something impressive visually, and the tortures (both physical and psychological) suffered by the protagonist (assuming they are real and not hallucinations) strike and involve the viewer greatly. A truly offbeat film, with a "do-it-yourself" ending: everyone has their own impression, and no one can say they are right, every thesis or assumption can be valid.