film, eyeballs, brain

One night last week a mysterious woman gave me a DVD. “This is really creepy,” she said as she slipped the disc into my hands. Almost with trepidation, I watched it the next evening, steeling myself for the weirdness to come.

Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a mysterious woman (it was J-Lu, who’s actually rather mysterious herself), but the film, Ken Nikai’s 2001 film Soundtrack, is itself a real oddity, a visually gorgeous and disturbing nightmare of a movie.

The movie begins with the words “The darkest hour is before the dawn” superimposed on a painting of a wintry landscape; the carnival figures in the painting come to life and walk towards the camera: the tale has begun. Soundtrack is supposed to work as a fable, a dreamy evocation of something primal — in this case, European (Punch and Judy, the Brothers Grimm). It’s the story of two siblings, Sion (played by Sugizo, apparently a musician in one of those bizarre androgynous J-rock bands) and Misa (played by the beautiful Kou Shibasaki, who — especially after her performance in Kinji Fukusaku’s Battle Royale — clearly plays unhinged just a little too well). He, decked in deliberately tattered couture, plays the violin; she illustrates books about the moon and ice cream.

What differentiates the movie from, say, The Princess Bride is the surprising amount of mutilation and dismemberment. There is an outlandish and visually interesting scene, for instance, when a female warrior of sorts, brandishing a sword, weaves through blobs of blood suspended in mid-air after she has calmly decapitated a couple of victims. There are kids in it — and they are drenched in blood before too long — and so the movie’s definitely not for kids.

In some respects, the film can be argued to be no more than a glorified music video for Sugizo (though J-Lu reminds me that it’s his movie, after all). Since Shibasaki’s character is mute, she does little more, at least initially, than smile, draw and scream; Sugizo himself is practically silent as well. There is very little actually spelled out in terms of plot — not that there’s much of one in any case — and because a good amount of the film is focused on watching Sugizo play his music (one pivotal scene is practically a perverse re-enactment of Nero fiddling while Rome burns), the music video comparisons can’t be helped. The director’s visual aesthetic is part Dave McKean, part Evanescence video — all gauzy CGI goodness, with an unrelieved palette of sickly greens and purples and insouciantly rumpled hair and clothes.

But it’s actually a more interesting film, if only the execution was a little less… indulgent, I suppose. There are, for instance, all these nakedly Freudian symbols on display — the giant nest in which the two siblings sleep, the constant reappearance of ice-cream cones, the cleft in the tree from which handwritten notes spew forth, the red pregnant Moon-planet in the sky.

And while the almost-interminable looped shots of Sugizo playing the same violin riff over and over could be interpreted as the work of a lazy filmmaker, it’s also an excellent cinematic analogue to his scarred memories; the recurring motifs and scenes suggest, as befitting the nature of trauma, an uncontrollable, compulsive repetition. (The editing throughout the movie — flashing forward, then backward, with few cues for the audience — signals this same lack of control over the frightening images.) Like the music soundtrack, Sion (and, by extension, the film itself) is stuck in a groove from which he cannot escape — at least, until another form of doubling, right out of Vertigo, occurs halfway through the film.

In the end, however, the lavish production design doesn’t quite save the movie from being something of a self-indulgent if visually unique and interesting mess; not knowing anything about the movie certainly heightened the mystery for me.

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