'X' marks the spot
Kiyoshi Kurosawa mesmer-eyes a Cure.

By Johnny Ray Huston

IF YOU'VE WATCHED a recent horror film, chances are you're under the influence of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. If you don't know it, blame Hollywood. Right before The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's choicest slab of WB-approved remake beefcake is carved up, he and Leatherface dart through a sheets-on-clotheslines maze that might be borrowed from Kiyoshi-san. Then there are the more blatant thefts. Gore Verbinski's Ring drowns in diluted Kurosawa imagery as much as it mimics original Ringu-master Hideo Nakata: its malevolent videotape, and slow-crawl streams of water that forecast wrath, can be traced back to Kurosawa's 1997 Cure. The Pang brothers' Eye is a 10th-generation photocopy of a Kurosawa work, replacing unsettling prophecy and philosophy with sentimental heroics. The nadir in this game of symbolic and semiotic thievery has to be Feardotcom, a jaw-droppingly awful movie that not only steals visual details (shadowy figures behind plastic curtains) but also thoroughly ruins an entire conceit – the idea of a deadly Web site – from Kurosawa's 2001 Pulse.

Hollywood wanted a Pulse, but it doesn't have one. Kurosawa's film was titled Kaïro, which roughly translates to Circuit. The name Pulse was favored by Miramax, which purchased the distribution rights to Kurosawa's original with the intention of creating a remake, directed by Wes Craven and starring Kirsten Dunst. This plan immediately vanquished any hope that one of this decade's standout films would reach U.S. theaters. But the final (one can only hope) insult arrived during the summer of last year, when Bob Weinstein officially pulled the plug on Craven's project, claiming it was – irony of ironies – "too similar to The Ring." Strange that this Hollywood excuse for logic wasn't applied to Feardotcom. Instead of even trying to imitate the eerie melancholic depth of Pulse, that movie became another opportunity for this century's inferior answer to Vincent Price – Geoffrey Rush – to shine another paycheck from studio owners.

In the United States, Kurosawa's direct presence has largely been limited to too-rare film festival appearances and all-region DVD players. But that situation changes with this week's domestic DVD release of Cure, which had a brief theatrical run in 2001. Kurosawa specializes in injecting profundity into genre works, and on its surface, Cure is a low-budget detective movie. Takabe (Kurosawa's thespian doppelgänger Koji Yakusho) is investigating a series of murders with one trait in common: the victims have an X slashed across their throats. The "murderer" varies from crime to crime, though the audience is privy to Takabe's rival before some sitting-duck police officers discover him: most content smoking a cigarette and cradling a can of pop, Mamiya (Masuto Hagiwara) is a disaffected young man who seems to suffer from amnesia. In his very first appearance – approaching a boyish, soon-doomed teacher on Shirasato Beach – Kurosawa couples Mamiya with bad tide-ings; the scene's images of waves advancing on barren land are immensely foreboding.

"Look into ... the HYPNOTIC EYE!" a mad hypnotist bellows at viewers in the 1960 horror film The Hypnotic Eye. Kurosawa's tactical approach to the rich links between filmmaking and mesmerism is more insidious and ingenious. He's obviously done research, as a tracking shot across Mamiya's bookshelf, packed with titles such as Mesmer of Paris and Animal Magnetism and Its Psychological Effects, makes clear. (Franz Anton Mesmer is thanked in the film's credits.) "Who are you?" the blank Mamiya repeatedly asks the people he encounters, only seconds after they've already given their societally sanctioned idea of an answer. Rapidly or gradually, the repetition of this question opens cracks in the identity of each person Mamiya meets. Transference reaches its apogee when the college dropout and the upstanding cop finally face off.

The overworked Takabe's psych-fissures are a fun game for Mamiya. Trapped in robotic domestic rituals, Takabe's wife-in-a-box (Anna Nakagawa) is malfunctioning; at home she's prone to running an empty dryer, and outside she frequently loses track of where she's going. Seconds after the detective and his nemesis cross paths, Takabe erupts into rage. "I ask the questions! You answer!" he yells – not a good sign, considering they have yet to even enter an interrogation room. Once they do, the sublimated bleak wit characteristic of Kurosawa's screenplays becomes overt. When Takabe produces photos of the victims, Mamiya tells the detective that he must like corpses since he carries around pictures of them; yanked into an adjoining room, a furious Takabe can't resist hurling a cup of coffee at the one-way window that displays his chief suspect's unreadable face.

Takabe's inevitable journey into the cultivatedly "empty" mind of his enemy reaches the heart of darkness when he watches a videotape of a mysterious silent film, dating from the 19th century, that demonstrates hypnotherapy. Here is the riddle-like visual poem that inspired Nakata's (and Verbinski's) infamous cryptic videos, yet it's but one of Cure's symbols. Fire and water – the flame of a cigarette lighter and the slow trickle of a spilled glass – are two of Mamiya's tools. Kurosawa turns meager budgets into an asset by using pointed close-ups and soundtrack choices to magnify the almost violent dissonance of city life (an approach elaborated by his former assistant Akihiko Shiota in Harmful Insect). Thus everyday visual and audio echoes play tricks with Takabe's perception; at one point it's as if he's witness to a conversation between a malfunctioning streetlight and a building-top beacon.

While Cure draws directly from a European dissection of identity – an attack scene quotes from the surgical sequence of Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face – Kurosawa is also a "foreign" director whose knowledge of American film surpasses that of most of his American contemporaries. The bonus features of Home Vision Entertainment's DVD include a subtitled (thanks to Linda Hoaglund) interview that is revealing on a number of fronts. Kurosawa pinpoints a personal fascination with American films produced in the time period leading up to when "what we in Japan called the New American Cinema exploded, right before Steven Spielberg made Jaws." He views the early-to-mid '70s as an era when Hollywood didn't know what kind of movies to make, and therefore various subjects were explored, allowing genre specialists such as Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah to create works that "have very complex themes" in which "confusion and sophistication coexist." This is one lesson the dollar sign-eyed players behind Ring-style remakes have yet to learn.

Kurosawa also discusses another trademark, his imaginative and suggestive use of location. In Cure his past made-for-video yakuza projects with production designer Tomoyuki Maruo come to fruition, forming a troubled vision of turn-of-the-century Tokyo. "When you are shooting in Tokyo, it's very hard to find a good location," he explains. "Everything seems superficial, somewhat new." (Take note, Sofia Coppola.) Instead, he opted for "slightly dilapidated buildings and older buildings that everyone's forgotten about," using set details to transform hospital rooms into bedrooms and vice-versa. This approach has proved influential. Both Nakata (in Dark Water) and Shiota (in Harmful Insect) have used eroding, abandoned architectural sites to suggest societal breakdown; for Kurosawa's and Shiota's teen protagonists, these spaces serve as a refuge.

Though many critics have viewed Kurosawa's most recent film, Bright Future, as a departure, its emphasis on conflict between generations and its portraits of alienated youth occupying the decayed outskirts of urban Japan are naturalized relatives of the themes found in Cure and Pulse. Barricading "forbidden" rooms by placing red masking tape around door frames, the latter movie's growing army of ghosts in human form evokes the phenomenon of hikikomori, a withdrawal from contemporary Japanese society that is quite literal: according to some reports, more than a million teens and twentysomethings have taken to enclosing themselves in their apartments or even bedrooms for years at a time. Mamiya's apartment in Cure is one such fortress of unhinged isolation. The array of abandoned objects there contain untold – probably disturbing – stories.

"I wonder whether any film can call itself perfect and complete in two hours," Kurosawa told an audience after a Sept. 10, 2001, screening of Pulse in Toronto. "Actually, I would posit that the films you have fun watching, that give closure, don't reside in the memory. What you've just seen" – minutes earlier, during Pulse's climax, a plane had careened into a cityscape – "is only a tiny speck of what I puzzle over on a daily basis." Cure's final shot leaves the viewer with another such puzzle piece; in recent years, only Bruno Dumont's comparatively pompous Humanité has concluded with a vision that so rigorously demands interpretation. Takabe is last glimpsed in a generic restaurant (the type of setting that also figures heavily in Kurosawa's 2000 Séance as well as in Harmful Insect), eating, drinking coffee, and talking into a cell phone. All ordinary activities. Yet he has also picked up a new habit, and the repercussions of that habit appear to ricochet, just as the credits begin to rise, in shards, from the bottom of the screen.

'Cure' is available from Home Vision Entertainment. For more information go to www.homevision.com.