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Dir. Kei Fujiwara
In the industrial outskirts,
isolated from a social environment, a police detective - tall, swaggering and
confident, even if it means breaking rules - with his partner awaits to burst
an illegal organ harvesting operation. The environment is dark, run down and
moody in the night-time darkness. Inside, a factory environment covered in
plastic sheeting and dulled metal, the film shows a coarseness that feels
rancid even before Organ's more
gristly events. The bust goes badly wrong. His partner, seemed to be dead, goes
missing. Without his limbs and with an infection growing on him, he is locked
up in a secret room of a biology teacher's office. The teacher is the surgeon
who was performing the illegal operations. Slowly disintegrating, a repulsive
pus-infected growth developing around the liver area of his stomach, he has the
compulsion to kill the female students in his school, while a female member of
the staff, a sultry woman who yet views him in contempt as a "hentai"
(pervert), recognises that something is amiss with him. The surgeon, while
hiding this cover, is struggling with his sister (the director Kei Fujiwara herself, medical eye path,
long messy hair, bold facial features, the actor-director radiating a toughness
that is far removed from a shrinking violet) to keep control of the organ
harvesting operation from the yakuza who've hired them. The yakuza seem to feel
that their lucrative business is being threatened, as the twin of the missing
police partner, a youthful man, is searching for him, blatantly sitting outside
their headquarters. The police detective, disgraced and on leave, drunk and
intoxicated by guilt of what took place, abandoning his family to the wolves,
stumbles around the wastelands of industrial Japan also searching for his
partner.
The film is messy. Bloody and
gruesome. Rust. Puke. Dilapidated buildings and public lavatories. Pustulating,
rotting flesh. Cancerous even. Knife stabbing. Blunt force trauma. Beatings.
Injection by syringe. Nothing in Organ
as it escalates is clean, even the plotting. As each group or person try to
gain control, the result is more brutality and icky body horror. In the police
raid that sets the story plotlines up this tone is set up, the climax a
ramshackle, desperate battle with participants writhing on the floor, and
bottles and syringes being used, people kicking about on said floor and
battering each other in an "operation room" with limited space and
lighting. This tone continues throughout the film - chaotic and desperate. The
lowest ebb in people's lives, the worse cases of isolation, neglect and
madness. Even a struggle involving a samurai sword in an underpass is a
scramble rather than a masterful Zatochi
moment, beginning with a farce involving an old man, and descending in a
brawl where a gun doesn't necessarily win a fight and a car is more
effective. The messiness also comes from the oppressive tone. My original
interest in Organ, many years ago,
was because the director/co-star was the lead actress in Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), which, after some background reading,
she worked alongside its director Shinya
Tsukamoto doing the cinematography as well as acting with him on-camera. She
only has two directorial features in her filmography, including this one and ID (2005), but it's still inspiring to
see not only another female director who has a clear voice here, which is still
something lacking even now in the apparently politically correct era, but
doesn't make a safe stereotype of what a film made by female director should be.
In fact, with its electronic/industrial
soundtrack, Organ stands out as one
of those examples, alongside others such as Baise-moi (2001) and Trouble
Every Day (2001), as films by female directors who push boundaries more so
than many male directors attempting to make provocative films. Targeting themes
that interested the creators and with no ground deemed too violent or sadistic
to prod. Organ is just as oppressive
as many a one by a male director, maybe more so than many. One where moments
that this is a woman's view on this material stands out, how her character is
just as strong as the males, and any sexuality is not titillation but something
extremely provocative. Where the casualness of how someone, just after a
traumatic event happens to them at their lowest, urinates on newspaper on the
floor causes your gut to twist in itself in horror. The similarities with Tetsuo are there - the claustrophobic, muddily
lighted sets, the decay physically onscreen in industrial and urban
environments, and that aforementioned score, but there are clear distinctions
as well. Tetsuo was a sonic assault,
while this is a slow lingering death, which ends with a lack of moral lessons
being learnt and pointless murder. Blood spilt, people abandoned, guilt felt by
some, and evil not being punished. While Tsukamoto
tries to address the nature of human people crushed by society, this is not
even an attempt to address it but to depict this at its worse.
I confess, those years ago when I
first saw Organ, I utterly despised
it. Returning to it, while positively, I understand why. It is completely
repellent in tone for most of its narrative, continually violent, nihilistic
and lingering on disease and injury in a way more sickening than even some
notorious Japanese gore films like the Sushi
Typhoon works or even Takashi Miike's
more extreme movies. The narrative and tone can also be choppy, erratic and floating
between dreams and half-remembered quasi-psychic links to other events at the
same time. The plotting is admittedly sparse and messy, which effected that
first viewing, but the emphasis is on the images and they stand out. The
message is likely, if one is to be found, about the prolonged effects of
violence physically and mentally on people. The missing police partner becomes
this, a symbol of regret as he takes at the same time the role of another
character's nagging conscious. So are the surgeon and his sister who, told in
flashback, were maimed as children by their mother, while the effects of the
police bust in general leaves all devastated. The violence is gristly yet
strangely compelling. Gristly - such as the bloodless yet painful scene of
someone being pinned to a wall by a small truck. Strangely compelling - sexual
gratification through disease and pain, and an incestuous dream of a butterfly
woman birthing worms as she leaves her cocoon. The David Cronenberg sense of the physical disorders being as much
representative of the characters' states of mind is obvious, though the
nihilism is something idiosyncratic to it, more bleak and nasty than even Cronenberg's work. At times, it evokes Noisy Requiem (1988) - reviewed here -
if it was a gore genre movie shot in colour.
The structure and the pace of the
film is still suspect returning to it. It could be a case that I'm merely
battling between the perceived ideal of a clear filmic structure and my growing
adoration for the completely disruption of these rules by accident or purpose. I
wouldn't be surprised if many find it off-putting in tone and content, as it
ends with a bleak view of humanity. Its film's abrasive, low-res tone, set
against content with the small, closed-in-on characters in a constant state of
damage, is not palatable for people who cannot stand intentionally nasty
material. In utmost respect for Kei
Fujiwara this is a bold way for anyone to make their directorial debut. I want
to see the other film ID and regret
that's the only film that also exists, my view on Organ drastically different as I've come to embrace these chaotic
and unsettling works now as an adult. I was willing to embrace Ichi The Killer (2001) as a young guy,
still powerful and unsettling now, but with a style to its darkness, while this
intentionally sordid creation was too far for me then and tested my patience.
Now it's something legitimately good in extreme Japanese cinema. It's not
surprising in hindsight Fujiwara made
this film, she who starred in a film like Tetsuo:
The Iron Man, and what happens to her character in it, and does to another
character in a dream sequence within it too. She wasn't going into making Organ to present a stereotype of a
female director but instead created something that leaves a nasty, and well
placed, mark deep into the skin and eyes of the viewer.
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