ICHI THE KILLER

The boss of the Yakuza Anjo disappears without a trace along with a million yen. In search of him is Kakihara, a crazy sadomasochist member of Anjo's clan, who is convinced that the boss has been kidnapped by a rival gang. But in reality, behind all this hides Jijii, an elderly ex-boss of the Yakuza, full of resentments for having been excluded in the past from the clan, who has decided to carry out his revenge by setting the gangs against each other in order to weaken and defeat them. The weapon that Jijii will use for his revenge is Ichi, a frustrated psychopathic killer with unheard-of destructive abilities and a dramatic past behind him. Acts Tadanobu Asano (Kakihara) in a scene from the film: "Each of us has a sadistic and a masochistic part, but this... this Ichi seems completely sadistic. How I would like to meet him!" In these few words spoken by Kakihara lies the entire true essence of the film, the soul of "Ichi the Killer", an istrionic film by Takashi Miike that blends in one work the language and cruelty of Japanese gangster movies to the visual exaggeration, sometimes almost parodic, typical of manga. Based on the eponymous manga by Hideo Yamamoto, "Ichi the Killer" is a fun and entertaining cinematic mosaic where all genres, from comedy to horror, coexist and collaborate harmoniously to fulfill a common purpose: to create a sui generis work and an epic aftertaste difficult to attribute to a specific genre or trend. Miike, thus, using the subject of Yamamoto and in collaboration with Sakichi Satō who adapts it for the big screen, creates an admirable pastiche of genres as well as an unusual and fascinating film that plays with the viewer dragging him into an euphoric whirlwind of goliardia and extreme sadism. The starting situation, as well as the one that serves as the backdrop to the entire story, is easily recognizable in the films about the Yakuza, but despite this, we are not spared frequent and violent forays into the horror genre softened subsequently and/or simultaneously by light sketches tending to the comic or the grotesque. The violence, so present in the film that it sometimes seems to materialize on the set to become one of the main and fundamental protagonists to the resolution of the plot, certainly represents one of the most interesting aspects. Miike makes unusual use of it, almost artistic one would say, charges it to the point of carrying it to the most unimaginable excesses adopting solutions that hit the viewer's stomach directly. But it is a two-faced violence that of "Ichi the Killer", a violence that does not always aim to impress but often and willingly wants to entertain the viewer making him laugh with a series of sadistic and perverse situations that in another context would undoubtedly have shocked. And so it is that, once the ticket is paid, the viewer can fully enjoy the macabre carousel that continues with severed heads, bodies torn vertically, limbs cut or devoured, disembowelments of all kinds and bodies burned with boiling oil: in short, splatter abounds and flows serenely from the very first scenes to continue copiously until the appearance of the credits. Perhaps, the aspect that can most disturb (for not to say annoy) in "Ichi the Killer" is the deeply misogynistic side that pervades much of the film's scenes: the woman is insistently represented as a simple object of sexual desire (it is no coincidence that the few female characters who appear are prostitutes) without personality or effective value within society and useful only to satisfy the growing and irresistible sexual impulse of the man. An additional element of interest in the analysis of "Ichi the Killer" is undoubtedly the sexuality, emptied here of any religious and procreative meaning to be completely abandoned to the libidinous sphere in which, for being constantly in search of mere physical pleasure, the individual does not delay to venture into perverse and often ambiguous practices. There is no character, in Miike's film, who knows how to make an "adequate" use of the sexual act: the boss Anjo to reach pleasure cannot help but maltreat to blood before the act the prostitutes who work for him so as to assert his virility; Kakihara is a slave to masochism and is linked to his boss by an ambiguous sexual bond made of pain and pleasure; Ichi, on the other hand, is simply a frustrated man unable to assert his sexuality and capable of getting excited only in front of scenes of carnal violence. All morally condemnable characters, those who parade in "Ichi the Killer", there are no good and bad guys in Miike's work but only characters who act in virtue of their vices and their interests. The characters who parade on the scene are many, perhaps too many, and consequently not all manage to receive the right space in the time allowed. But Miike does not seem interested in looking at the vicissitudes of all his characters, some of whom seem intentionally neglected, but only a few. To emerge on the scene is mainly the sadomasochist Kakihara, charismatic member of the Yakuza, who thanks to a fascinating grotesque look (scars all over his face and two piercings at the ends of his mouth indispensable to keep the jaw together given the two non-cicatrizable cuts on his cheeks) and the splendid performance of the character Tadanobu Asano manages to steal the scene throughout the duration of the film from any other character, even from Ichi himself who is portrayed as a simple war machine manipulated by Jijii (played by director Shinya Tsukamoto) and unable to achieve a real evolution during the course of the film. The only sore point weighing on this immense work of Miike is the sometimes excessive and sometimes inappropriate use of computer graphics that to the eyes of today's viewer might seem excessively crude and dated. There is little else to say, "Ichi the Killer" in addition to being a fundamental piece in the filmography of one of the most interesting authors among those coming from the West such as Takashi Miike is a mandatory viewing for all lovers of that extreme cinema, capable of daring and not subservient to market laws. Not for all tastes.