Films: 2000s
(2002) Suicide Circle
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Suicide Circle (Jisastsu saakuru)
Director: Sion Sono
Release: 2002
Kuroda, (Ryo Ishibashi) a detective with the Tokyo police is on the trail of a horrific new phenomenon among the city's youth - mass suicide.
Scores of schoolgirls leap onto subway tracks. Students jump en-mass from rooftops. Twenty-somethings off themselves alone and in pairs.
Kuroda's own children seem to be onto something, an Internet connection that seems to be part of a puzzle built to give clues about the suicides. A boy calls Kuroda with further predictions and pieces of the puzzle, while a Web site ticks off the death toll just moments before the new reports make the news. And then there is the great loops of skin left packed in white vinyl sports bags at some of the scenes, each strip of tissue sewn together as a kind of log of inventory of the dead.
From every unattended speaker and television pulse the incessant, chiming candy-coated songs of preadolescent girl group Dessert. Meanwhile, in a basement bowling alley, a cross-dressing post-Bowie glam-o-path named Genesis (Rolly Teranishi) forms his own reaction to disposable-culture and seeks to ride the cultural coattails of the self-destruction that grips Japan.
The great fans of bright red blood that splash subway walls and windows, the mothers hacking their own fingers off while they slice parsnips in the kitchen, the handfuls of aspirin down tossed hatches, the gun barrels roaring inside mouths - all of these add up to a kind of Eastern test blotch for Sono's camera.
Tokyo is bored and asleep. "Suicide Circle" probes the concept of self-relation in a world inundated with overstimulation - a world literally full of dessert (the name of the pop group, here, of course).
Bored down to its core, unable to feel or perceive its own feelings - Sono' s Japanese seem unable to sustain real interpersonal relationships. The only time the veil lifts, in Sono's world - the only time characters touch each other or emote directly - is just prior to, or following, moments of death.
This is why the clasped hands of jumpers, the palm on the bloodied brow, or the sudden clutching greeting Kuroda gives his wife after viewing the tangled bodies of children make such an impact. Otherwise, most of the denizens of "Suicide Circle" are paralyzed.
They are paralyzed like Shibusawa (Masatoshi Nagase), who literally falls into a fetal position on the subway stairs when he realizes that none of the people he and colleague Kuroda seek to save really care what happens to their fellow travelers (or themselves).
They are paralyzed like Kuroda, who makes only one attempt to talk with his doomed family about the suicides he investigates, aborting when his kids moan about the "family meeting," and television takes over.
They are paralyzed like Internet addict Koomori (Yoko Kamon), who calls herself The Bat and stares into the blue light of the screen, a voyeur onto the carnage. While she is curious about what causes the suicides, she never shares her information with the police - she would then stand to lose her chance to see the next chapter unfold from her takeout-strewn bedroom.
Eventually, his bagged menagerie includes Koomori and her girlfriend. And while his methods are antisocial and sadistic (if not outright lethal), Koomori is awakened by them and reaches out to the authorities with what she knows.
His work, perhaps unconsciously, complete, Genesis allows himself to be captured, hoping to tell the world he is the Charles Manson of the electronic age. But his voice is muted and quickly forgotten. There are, after all, new entertainments to absorb. And the suicides continue.
Waking up from the unconscious world is not, according to Sono's film, an act of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement. Both such efforts fail. It is instead, an act of self-reliance.
In the final act of "Suicide Circle" a marginal character, Mitsuko (Saya Hagiwara) discovers the secret behind the waves of death. She finds that it is not a sequined madman like Genesis, or a cult like the authorities suspected.
The root of the suicides is something abstract, something at once miraculous and mundane, tied to the very consciousness of 21st-century Japan and its older, Buddhist roots.
In a dreamlike coda, Mitsuko confronts the abscess in the center of the modern (perhaps faithless) Japanese heart, and answers the question Sono reiterates throughout the film: "What is your connection to yourself?" All the splatter, and shocking stops on pavement, and jump scares, and grotesqueries of "Suicide Circle" are really canvasses against which this question is thrown: Short of sharp and awful self-inflicted death, can these characters recognize their own free will in the glop of determined urban existence? Can they choose follow their own lives, or will they, lemming-like, clasp hands with whoever is nearby and commit brief acts of sensory overload to achieve annihilation - and thus a kind of group identity?
"Suicide Circle" is an art film about rediscovering the will to live. It is wrapped in the aesthetic - the lighting, scripting, and effects - of horror cinema, but it transcends the form and stands among other great works of sociological freakout. Adherents of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" should thusly take note.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Suicide Circle, 2002
In a dreamlike coda, Mitsuko confronts the abscess in the center of the modern (perhaps faithless) Japanese heart, and answers the question Sono reiterates throughout the film: "What is your connection to yourself?"
