Ichi The Killer [DVD] [2003]

I first saw Ichi at the London Film Festival a few years ago, having been a fan of Audition and Dead or Alive, and couldn't believe my senses. Leaving the cinema I made a beline for the bar. On DVD, the film looks tamer, and having been cut by three minutes or so, it's not too surprising. Various scenes are shorter than before (beatings, torture, rape etc.), and the most notorious scene (which, for prudence sake, I won't describe here, but comes near the end just before the detective dons his dog-ears - fans of the film will know what I mean), actually this last scene made me feel pretty queasy when I saw it in full, so I confess I don't really miss it that much, although it does screw with the continutiy. Confusingly, the commentary track refers to the uncut version and seems to have been edited slightly to account for the gaps. This is particularly odd when the protagonists are discussing a scene which 'a lot of people had problems with' and you're watching a pair of gangsters standing by a door.

Having said all of that, Premiere Asia have done a stirling job with the DVD, after all, it's not their fault that the BBFC took the scissors to the movie and it's obvious that they have made a effort to compensate for this. This two disc set is well presented and features plenty of bits and bobs to keep you occupied. The commentary is quite entertaining, although Bey Logan's knowlege of Japanese cinema isn't a patch on his knowlege of Hong Kong movies and he makes up the lost time by flirting with Alien Sun. More amusing than informative (unless you want to flirt with Alien Sun, of course).

Summing up: fun film, good disc, shame about the cuts, but I'd probably be covering my eyes at those scenes anyway...

The tag line for the film's release in Japan was "Ai wa, kanari itai", meaning, "Love really hurts", and that is what it's all about here; Miike examines the idea that if love is pain, then perhaps pain can be love, and indeed for Kakihara and the others the greatest expression of love is pain. Kakihara is so terrifying in his sadism for most of the film that it comes as a powerful shock to realise that he is simply desperate for what, for him, is the only kind of love.

Miike is also a master of humour. Okay, I know you have to get past the general sickness of a film with such graphic scenes of torture, rape and violence, but it's only a piece of art, after all, and the film deliberately emphasizes its artificiality. You can laugh at it, and if you allow yourself to laugh it is brilliantly funny. Miike has also shot scenes so beautifully that some stand out very powerfully indeed, and help to draw together all these opposing elements that he is trying to marry to each other: pain and love, beauty and ugliness, life and death, humour and horror. He da man.

Finally, this edition of Ichi is supposedly very good. Although there seems to me no point in cutting Ichi the Killer for reasons of decency (because then it would be about five minutes long) it seems that the original Western releases were cut slightly; there is a torture scene missing, I believe. I think that everything that's in Ichi is vitally necessary to the overall effect of the film so I would advise you to buy this, the fully uncut version.

Unfortunately, it's these most extreme scenes that the censor has snipped (over 3 minutes of them, an almost unprecedented amount of cuts). So you're allowed to coast through -- comparatively speaking, of course; it's still not for the faint of heart -- with little more than an awkward giggle or uncomfortable squirm. The edited Ichi does really feel like a violence fetishist's jack-off material, and it also feels like a largely vacuous exercise. Cutting those crucial minutes where Miike really does go too far -- quite deliberately -- not only removes the point of the movie, it turns it into exactly what the censors were afraid of in the first place.

Oh well, plus ça change. See the uncut 'Ichi' if you can. Even the animé version has more of the intended spirit of the material.