iddle-aged Tokyo businessman Aoyama (The Grudge's Ishibashi) watches his wife die on a hospital bed just as his little son Shigehiko arrives with a get-well gift to cheer up his mom. Seven years later, Shigehiko (Sawaki), now a teenager, tells his dad that he looks old and that he should remarry.
At work, Aoyama talks with a colleague about how everyone in Japan is lonely. Later, Aoyama hooks up with his friend Yoshikawa (Kunimura, Boss Tanaka from Kill Bill Vol. 1), who produces movies. The two 50-ish guys hunch over their drinks at a bar and wonder: "What happened to all the good girls?"
Yoshikawa has a great idea. He's producing a movie about a love triangle among a dancer, her patron and a boy with Down syndrome. He and Aoyama can stage an audition nominally to find the film's lead, "tomorrow's heroine," but really to find Aoyama a second wife.
Aoyama and Yoshikawa announce their search for "tomorrow's heroine" over the radio. In a dank, abandoned-looking apartment, a little girl in ballet clothes stares at the radio, listening intently to the announcement.
Aoyama is smitten with a girl at the audition named Asami (Shiina). Yoshikawa has a bad feeling about her. Aoyama calls her anyway. The courtship between the older man and the younger woman is at times awkward, punctuated as it is by nightmares, visions and the warping of time and space. Asami disappears. Aoyama goes looking for her with no real regard for what he might lose, painfully, along the way.
Cut up film to cut up people
Audition is a film famous for its moments of torture, dismemberment and brutalization. Yes, the film features all of these, but the real torture and dismemberment are committed not by any character in the movie but by Miike himself. Audition makes film itself an implement of torture.
Poor Aoyama, as his romance with Asami blossoms, faces an escalating breakdown of reality. The nature of that breakdown of reality for this would-be film producer is cinematic. Miike inflicts on Aoyama shifts in time, location and even tone, and Aoyama is aware of these shifts and is terrorized by them, as any of us would be if his life were "edited" like a movie. The real turning point for Aoyama is when he goes searching for the missing Asami, as would any film noir-style movie hero, even as his movie producer friend warns him not to. Aoyama follows her, at times physically, into her past, which is defined by her own torture-broken mind.
As Miike creates these postmodern horrors, he frames some shots, especially those in restaurants and cafes as Aoyama and Asami get to know each other, like modernist paintings. Some shots in a beach house look as if they were painted by Magritte.
What's remarkable about Audition is that, while it does play hard and fast with reality, modernism and postmodernism, it never loses its emotional core as a story about soul-crushing loneliness. Miike and his screenwriter Daisuke Tengan (son of director Shohei Imamura and writer of Miike's upcoming Masters of Horror segment "Imprint") do a remarkable job of filing the film with emptiness. Even without the overt horror elements and despite one or two slow moments, Audition would still be a classic horror film of isolation and despair in the vein of Taxi Driver and Requiem for a Dream.
