Film Review--The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

If there is a marker for what makes a great filmmaker, it is the ability to surprise their audiences. I love David Lynch, but I never thought he had a film like The Straight Story in him; likewise with David Cronenburg’s M. Butterfly and Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith. On the other side, as much as I may like Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks hasn’t told a new joke in 25 years, and you couldn’t pay me to watch Dracula: Dead and Loving It (well, you could pay me to watch, but that’s another story). I haven’t been exposed to the films of Takashi Miike for very long but through his films I have seen, I have come to expect certain elements of psychological horror and brutal violence. But, more than this, I enjoy his slow moving, but somehow highly kinetic, storytelling style. While the stories aren’t always completely linear, there is always a reason for the characters to exist and they move forward to a purpose. I couldn’t have been more surprised, then, by the end of The Happiness of the Katakuris, when it was clear that I’d just finished watching something closer to The Sound of Music than Ichi the Killer.

From the perspective of the young granddaughter, the film tells the story of the Katakuri family who, as a result of varying setbacks in their individual lives, start up a remote bed and breakfast to bring the family together and make a living together. While their intentions are good and the accommodations are outstanding, their guests, few as they may be, all wind up dead by sunrise. While the family does not kill them, they are terrified of driving away future business with the knowledge of the deaths, and take to burying the bodies in the marsh. All the while, the narrator’s mother, a single parent looking for love, falls for “Richard,” some guy with a uniform and a clearly fake name who she sees randomly at a restaurant (played by Kiyoshiro Imawano, apparently a big rock star in Japan). He feeds her the most comical line of bullshit I’ve heard in some time, she buys it and can think of nothing but him, even through the burial of the bodies. All of a sudden, the county announces that they’ll build a major highway directly alongside the inn. What a break, until the bitter irony hits that they will be building directly over where the bodies are buried. All of this madness is intercut with musical numbers in the style of Rodgers and Hart with a surreal quality of choreography that would please Busby Berkeley. All of the blood and horror is played for comedy, much like Cannibal! The Musical, which is fine and good until…snap!...the film takes an utterly effective emotional, dramatic turn and, just as the viewer begins to empathize with the situation…snap!...the film takes the most madly abstract road possible to finish the film off. Mix into all of this is the occasional claymation sequence and you’ve got one of the strangest musicals I have ever seen. This is the only Japanese musical I’ve ever seen, but I have a hard time believing that many others are like this. At first, I found myself mystified at what I was witnessing but, by the end, was laughing at nearly everything Miike threw at me. While the characters are Japanese, racially and in spirit, the songs are decidedly western and the juxtaposition adds a lot of substance to the production.

Happiness of the Katakuris comes in the middle of the most prolific portion of Takashi Miike’s career thus far; between 2000 and 2002, he completed twenty projects in film, television, and video. A lot of work, to be sure, but Miike is, at only 46 years old, already one of the most prolific directors of this or any generation, with more than sixty films under his belt. There’s a famous photo of an aged Hitchcock standing next to the screenplays from his fifty-odd productions, which are much taller than he is and leaning to collapse over him. Hitchcock may not have been a tall man, but that’s a lot of paper. Miike, over the course of his career, may not produce at the same quality of Hitchcock, but Miike’s productivity is hugely impressive and, let’s be honest, nobody makes all great films; The Birds and Torn Curtain are some pretty shabby productions themselves. It isn’t the quality of every production that Miike puts out as much as the consistency of vision that runs through his films, even if it is a musical. As the American DVD release says, “The hills are alive with the sound of screaming.” I couldn’t say it any better myself.