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THREE...
EXTREMES
AKA:
3 Extremes ||
Three 2 || Three Monsters
Year:
2004 Reviewer: Rob
Daniel
After
the ultimately failed experiment of 'Three'
(2002), the loose follow-up 'Three... Extremes' stands as a
marked improvement. Here
the three mavericks are Takashi Miike, Fruit Chan and Park
Chan-wook representing Japan, Hong Kong and Korea
respectively.
Yet,
audiences remain likely to walk away bemused because, despite
the title, the Category III rating and the track record of two
of the three directors (Miike and Park), this is more about
extreme ideas than graphic imagery.
'Ichi
the Killer' this is not.
And while 'Three' embraced the supernatural, 'Three...
Extremes' explores the realms of madness, obsession and
violence.
'Box',
the opening episode by Miike, is most likely to alienate the
gore crowd; its sombre, surreal dream logic and difficult
conclusion refusing to court an audience.
Kyoko
(Hasegawa), a young writer, finds professional success a
hollow comfort for the guilty secret she carries.
A child contortionist, she performed a double act with
her sister under the unsettling eye of their stepfather (Watabe).
Envious of the stepfather's (paedophilic) love for her
sister, Kyoko stages a prank that goes fatally awry.
Now, years later, Kyoko receives a letter summoning her
to the circus marquee once more for a reunion with her
master... and sister.
Miike
is in 'Audition' mood here.
Low key and haunting with abstract imagery reflecting a
mind distorted by guilt and obsession, 'Box' is one of the
director's most confident films.
Impeccably mounted and controlled, the story builds
from fragments of memory accompanied by stretches of
uncomfortable silence or regular Miike composer Koji Endo's
haunting musical box melody, and the icy blues of Kyoko’s
adult life are placed in stark contrast to the feverish ochre
of her childhood.
Matching
the disturbing visual colour scheme is the suggested
relationship the girls have with their stepfather, whose
obsession definitely strays into the arena of the unwell.
Cinematic cousins here would be Haneke's 'The Piano
Teacher', which also incorporated chilly visuals to tell the
tale of a sexually traumatized heroine, and Lynch's 'Lost
Highway' for sheer surrealism.
Likely
to have viewers reluctant to venture any further, 'Box' proves
international recognition thankfully has yet to temper Miike's
wilful nature.
Another
theme of 'Box' is women's preordained roles in society.
The child sisters repeatedly squeeze into tiny wooden
compartments at the behest of their cracked master.
This theme of female subservience carries over into the
next film, Fruit Chan's delirious, erotic and offensive
'Dumplings'.
Where
Miike played it cerebral Chan opts for viscera to depict the
extreme measures women choose to obtain eternal youth.
Revealing the central conceit would spoil the film's
morbid surprise, but Miriam Yeung is superb as a middle aged
TV-personality, desperate to reclaim her youth and keep her
wayward husband (Leung Kar Fei).
Her mania takes her to the squalid apartment of Mei (Bai),
and the rejuvenating dumplings for which Mei is famous.
But, the "extra" ingredient is not the
weak-stomached.
With
flashes of horror and a soundtrack of "wet" effects,
'Dumplings' is a triumph of distressing body horror.
Women's bodies and biology are put through the grinder,
with an abortion scene one of the squirmiest moments of
unpleasantness in recent memory, while the pay-off to Mrs.
Lee's unholy quest for youth is a perfectly executed piece of
social horror reminiscent of the best EC horror comic.
Add a climactic moment of vaginal trauma akin to Kim
Ki-duk's 'The Isle' and you have the ultimate anti-date movie.
But,
'Dumplings' is a fiery lick of horror with real guts to go
with its gore. Chan
and writer Lillian Lee comment on the huge class divide in
contemporary Hong Kong, with the working class Mei committing
vile atrocities to satiate the whim of the bourgeois Mrs. Lee,
but claiming some class revenge with Lee's final social
humiliation. Mei's
claims to be far older than her looks and her renditions of
Maoist songs while preparing the titular treats also add
another layer to her relationship with Mrs. Lee.
Bai's
performance reeks of evil and compromised values, but the
revelation here is Yeung.
Hitherto a Cantopop queen and star of inoffensive Hong
Kong fluff, this is a brave change of pace for her.
That she convinces as a maddened woman twenty years her
senior is a testament to a talent not yet fully tapped.
'Dumplings'
share many similarities with 'Going Home', the Hong Kong
segment of 'Three'. 'Going
Home's director Peter Chan is on producing duties here, and
both films are also available in extended versions
('Dumplings' features an additional fifty minutes) and both
boast breathtaking cinematography from the
needs-no-introduction Christopher Doyle, whose
good-enough-to-eat images and sumptuous sheen makes
'Dumplings' more disturbing than the cheerful grunge of 'The
Untold Story' and its clones.
'Dumplings'
themes of class war are focussed on in 'Three... Extremes'
closing episode, 'Cut'.
Park's
film is the most "mainstream" of the three, but
won’t be playing the multiplexes anytime soon.
'Cut' tackles the horror staple of home invasion for a
pitch black comic tale of social envy, class status and the
debilitating influence of violence.
Park
is responsible for the recently lauded 'Oldboy' and that
film's skewed humour pulsates here, as does the class hatred
savagely depicted in his previous 'Sympathy
for Mr Vengeance'.
A
handsome movie director (Lee) is taken hostage along with his
beautiful pianist wife (Kang) by a crazed movie extra (Lim).
The extra resents the director his handsome looks,
perfect life, talent and status.
To bring harsh reality into this charmed life, the
extra plays a series of sadistically inventive games to ruin
the purity of the man he both hates and idolizes.
Park
borrows some CG visual flourishes from David Fincher's 'Panic
Room' (another film about violence brought into the home), but
'Cut' is no mere hack and paste pastiche.
Played out on a movie set designed after the director's
home, it is an intense three-hander (or four counting a near
mute child hostage), with the director kept at bay by a length
of bungee rope and his wife memorably made into a piano
puppet, bound by wires and with fingers glued to the keys.
The
rules of the game are simple: perform a despicable act or one
by one the wife loses her digits.
Located
almost entirely on this one set, 'Cut' avoids a stagy dullness
thanks to Park's keen directorial eye.
A kinetic camera gleefully disorientates the viewer,
dancing alongside Lim's virtuoso performance (complete with
strange speech style apparently based on a local Korean
dialect), while compositions alternate between wide-angle
shots and uncomfortable close-ups.
As
with other home invasion films such as 'Straw Dogs', 'Panic
Room' and 'Funny Games', 'Cut' is about how middle-class
pacifism will collapse when people are pushed too far, and how
the violent impulses unleashed are difficult to control.
An
eclectic and compelling triumvirate of screen darkness, it
would be a shame if this marked the end of the 'Three'
experiment. How
about a film from female directors for the next instalment?
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