The Happiness of the Katakuris
Dir: Takashi Miike
2001
*****
If you are aware of the works of Takashi Miike then you will know to expect the unexpected, the strange, the wonderful and often the disturbing. No one does weird like Takashi Miike and his 2001 musical/comedy/horror The Happiness of the Katakuris is about as weird as it gets, however, I would argue that it is his most accessible - while 1999’s Audition is his most mainstream film but certainly not for anyone with a weak heart or nervous disposition. The film is actually a remake of the South Korean film The Quiet Family that came out in 1998. A remake with a Takashi Miike, as the original was a comedy horror but none of it was animated and at no point did the cast break into song. Kim Jee-woon, director of The Quiet Family, is also somewhat of a left-field film maker, so this is most certainly a tribute to him. Much like The Quiet Family, the Katakuris are a four-generation family of failures: patriarch Masao Katakuri (Kenji Sawada), his wife Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka), his father Jinpei (Tetsurō Tamba), his formerly criminal son Masayuki (Shinji Takeda), his divorced daughter Shizue (Naomi Nishida), her child Yurie (Tamaki Miyazaki, who narrates the film), and their dog, Pochi. The idea is essentially to risk everything in pursuit of the family ideal. So the family uses the father's redundancy pay to purchase a large old home situated on a former garbage dump near Mount Fuji that they have named the ‘White Lover's Inn'. They have the intention of converting it into a bed & breakfast, since the road running nearby is supposed to be expanded up to the house, which would bring many guests and tourists. However, the road hasn't been expanded yet and the Katakuris subsequently have no guests. When guests finally do begin to arrive, the Katakuris find (through no fault of their own) that their guests have an annoying habit of dying.Their first guest, a TV personality, arrives naked and subsequently commits suicide during the night. The Katakuris make the decision to save their business by burying the body and concealing the death. The second guest, a Sumo wrestler, dies of a heart attack during a tryst with his underage girlfriend, who also dies. Somehow, each of their guests ends up dead, either by suicide, accident or murder and pretty soon the bodies in the back yard begin to pile up. The Katakuris soon find themselves sucked into a nightmare of lies and fear (not helped by the arrival of the daughter's con-man boyfriend, an escaped murderer with police in hot pursuit). Just to add to their many worries, Mount Fuji has, for the first time in many years, decides to erupt. After many minutes of mania, musical numbers and claymation, Shizue meets a Richard Sagawa (Kiyoshiro Imawano), a mysterious U.S. naval officer who looks suspiciously Japanese but claims to be the nephew of Queen Elizabeth II. Thankfully, just when Richard stumbles into a clue that might lead him to uncover the string of disappearing guests, Mount Fuji begins rumbling to life with the promise of wiping their little secret away – as well as everything else. There are cultural themes that will go over the heads of a westerner like me but the puzzlement felt after this surreal ride is universal. The film itself is reminiscent of the music videos and live concert performances staged by 80s & 90's J-pop group Kome Kome Club who are widely recognized as the only Japanese pop rock musical group which achieved commercial success by blending soul and funk musical styles and the only band to have ever used the style of rakugo in their act. Miike's choice of Sawada Kenji as Katakuri Masao further accentuates this similarity, since he strongly resembles co-front man `Carl Smoky' Ishii Tatsuya. It may look like a film made up of several different films and ideas but that is Miike all over. The film maker makes several films a year and each one is as original and strange as the next. I gave up trying to understand everything that Miike does in his films, instead I just hold on tight, grab a large tub of pop-corn (and an alcoholic beverage) and enjoy the experience. It’s like Jan Švankmajer and 1980s bubble-gum pop got together to make a Monty Python style horror film and every bit as brilliant as that sounds. That said, with Takeshi Miike there is no comparison, he is a genre unto himself.