re:mote voices

Title: Visitor Q [Bizita Q]
Cast: Kenichi Endo, Shungiku Uchida, Kazushi Watanabe, Shoko Nakahara, Fujiko, Jun Mutô
Director: Takashi Miike

miike takashi goes all the way with his taboo bashing in visitor q. starting with a series of questions - the first being have you ever had sex with your father? quickly followed by the father paying to have sex with his daughter. then have you ever hit your mother? followed by the son beating his mother with a carpet beater. this is the set up an introduction to the family at the center of visitor q - who seem entirely unbalanced without the help of the titular visitor - a man who follows the father home one night. his role seems really to be witness to the final stages of something that has been building, though it is also possible to interpret him as being a catalyst.

the father is a tv presenter, who likes to make challenging programmes about the state of the nation. one night he was attacked, and decided to show the resulting footage of his humiliation on tv. this seems to be the key event - his daughter left home, and he finds her selling her body in a small flat, his son is being bullied at school, and as a result he comes home and takes out his rage and impotence by beating his mother, who consoles herself by taking drugs, the money for which she gets by being a dominatrix.

as a whole this is quite charged, and as the film goes on it escalates further, pushing each of the characters while the visitor watches it all. the climax leads to death, and finally the absurdity of the presentation becomes too much - the constant stream of inexplicably shocking material gets to a point where one can't help but laugh at the results.

for me there is something more raw and challenging than a lot of miike's work. audition was considerably polished, and its pacing didn't entirely work for me. ichi was shocking and violent, but based on a manga and it showed with the sense of the over the top. but visitor q is somehow more inexplicable, bemusing and intriguing by degrees, and no doubt appalling with it - there are certainly times of gasping jaw dropping disbelief. in particular the ambiguity and effects of the opening scene where the father is recording his daughter propositioning him, intermixed with her taking pictures of him with a polaroid is particularly striking and effective, the fact that it also sets up a certain unease can not be underestimated - at this point we don't know for sure that the two are related, but it is put in our mind. which is where a lot of visitor q's ability to disturb comes from, the way it is able to get into your head and mess with you.