VISITOR Q (Japan, 2001)



Directed by: Takashi Miike
Starring: Kenichi Endo, Shungiku Uchida, Kazushi Watanabe,
Shoko Nakahara
84 minutes, digital video, in Japanese with English subtitles

"Of the five or six movies Miike made last year Visitor Q is the most offensive."
- Tony Rayns, Toronto International Film Festival Catalogue

An incestual prologue and a corpse hacking finale are the two pieces of bread that hold together the filth sandwich that Takashi Miike wants to feed you: VISITOR Q.. Celebrating cultural values like sex and violence,
this ode to the family unit is Japan's ookiest home video. Little Brother beats his mother, when he's not getting whomped on by school bullies; Sis is a hooker; Dad is her sometime customer; Mom's a junkie. Taking basic family relationships and exaggerating them slightly - okay, a lot - Miike makes a movie that celebrates the family, even as it squirts breast milk all over their kitchen floor.

Starring manga artist Shungiku Uchida (known for her autobiographical bestseller, FATHER FUCKER) as the lactating matriarch, and shot for $70,000 in seven days as an entry in Cine Rocket's "Love Cinema" series, it's a nature film whose wild animals are your family members. Because Takashi Miike loves this family. They're homicidal, incestual, creepy, and all-together revolting but isn't that the way most of us feel about other peoples' families anyways? Who doesn't feel that, deep down, the families they see around them are dysfunctional, repressed and somewhat disturbing? From the friend whose mother seems just a little bit too close for comfort, to the in-law who keeps bragging about being "daddy's girl", to the co-workers who wanted to be ballet dancers or horticulturists but whose parents insisted they get a "real" job. And don't kid yourself, your family looks just as sick to everyone else.

In a display of universal empathy, Miike has literalized beyond any doubt every creepy feeling we've ever had for the families that surround us. He's pulled the roof off the dark bedrooms and put what we suspected were their sinister, secret urges front and center down by the footlights where they perform a lurid tap dance for our entertainment. Sarcastically filmed at the pace of Ozu's delicate domestic dramas, Miike plants a
cream pie right in the mug of Japan's number one cinematic good-taste touchstone ("I just loooove Ozu," gurgle most Western directors who make embalmed character studies that numb butts around the world), but he does
it in the name of love. Miike's shocking thesis: it's easy to love people for themselves when they've brushed their teeth and combed their hair and aren't squirting breast milk on us, but a lasting familial love can only come when our incestual, sick, drug-addled, violent, masochistic, necrophiliac tendencies are embraced as part of the whole, loveable package. Love me, love my gruesome fetish.

Takashi Miike has dropped jaws and boiled brain tissue around the world with the dozens of movies he fires from his fingertips like missiles every year. AUDITION ran for weeks at Film Forum, inspiring mass walkouts. ICHII THE KILLER recently played Lincoln Center, and DEAD OR ALIVE drowned unsuspecting Cinema Village moviegoers in a flood of excrement. But, as the venerable old critic, Tony Rayns, says, "Of the five or six movies Miike made last year, VISITOR Q is the most offensive." Right on.

Oozing bodily fluids, and jiggling with semen-stained slapstick this flick cordially invites you to join in a lactation celebration the likes of which you have never seen. Shot in ick-o-vision and featuring many, many jaw-dropping moments and cinematic firsts, VISITOR Q is a gut-busting, colon-clenching, deadpan hymn to the triumph of the
dysfunctional family.

> Midnight Eye rates VISITOR Q as the Best and the Worst film of 2001, here:
http://www.midnighteye.com/features/bestof2001.shtml

> Read an interview with Takashi Miike:
http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/takashi_miike.shtml

> Then read the exclusive interview with the director up on Fantasia's site:
http://www.fantasiafest.com/2000/intermik.htm

> Miike in French!
http://www.sanchodoesasia.com/sdtm/sdtm_interview1.htm