Romance In Extremis: The Bleak Satire of ‘Audition’
Audition is well known for being a deeply disturbing film, and the best thing about it is that it does not start off that way. For the first hour or so, it isn’t even horror, at least not by any conventional metric. Audition is a 1999 film, hailing from Japan, directed by the legendary Takashi Miike. For the bulk of its runtime, it really feels like a parody of Western romantic comedies, which had become fixed to increasingly absurd and manipulative plots by the end of the ’90s. Audition follows a man named Aoyama, who has lost his wife and has had difficulty not just moving on, but simply living in general without her.
It’s not just the emotional pain that weighs on him, he’s lost any sense of direction and forward momentum. He wants to meet someone new, but he has been out of the dating game a long time, and he has no idea how to approach women. His friend talks him into casting a movie solely so that he can use the casting process to find a wife. This hits on and amplifies so many of those ’90s rom-com tropes. It takes them to the extreme, and then it stays there. The male hero of these movies almost always misleads and manipulates the girl and the audience is meant to be on his side the entire time, even while what he’s doing is incredibly gross.
Even though it certainly doesn’t always feel like one, Audition can be read as a black comedy because so many of the conventions and tropes it’s playing with are inherently tied to that genre. Aoyama is empathetic enough to the point that the audience can still identify with him and follow his story, because this manipulative process wasn’t really his idea, and his actions are by and large coming from a place of grief. It’s enough to keep us from turning off the film by the time the titular audition process is introduced.
Audition shines an unsettling light on the male inclination to lie to women, to present a false face when first meeting someone, the “best version” of one’s self, but to the extreme. Both Aoyama and his friend seem to get that what they are doing is deceptive, but they barely even question it. Aoyama is mostly ignorant of what a gross thing he is doing.
The movie truly kicks into gear when he finds the right girl. Her name is Asami. Most of the women who have auditioned for the “movie” just talk about themselves, they are confident and outgoing and seem very interested in advancing their career as an actor. That’s not really a bad thing when auditioning for a feature film. Asami, however, is none of those things.
She is meek, she is quiet, she has an impressive performance background in dance, but she does not seem desperate to make a star of herself. She is beautiful, but delicate, she looks fragile and that is clearly such a large part of why he is drawn to her in the first place. Right away, the things Aoyama mentions as her most attractive qualities are concerning. He likes that she is well-behaved and that she doesn’t speak unless spoken to, as though describing a good student, an obedient child, not a prospective spouse. There are cultural differences that come into play in that respect, to some degree, but even still, it is an obvious objectification and that is of course the point.
The male gaze is baked into the film, because it frankly can’t not be. Aoyama is looking for a checklist, not a partner, and the bullet points of that list basically boil down to a woman whose entire life revolves around him. He sees a beautiful idealized romance, a fantasy girl. That’s so much of what I’ve always thought is the appeal of Audition. A man puts a woman on a pedestal and is disgusted to see her standing on it. Those things he thinks he wants? Well, that’s exactly what he gets. A woman whose entire life revolves around him and thus, wants his entire life to revolve around her. She doesn’t care about whether or not the movie is real and she never did. All that Asami wants is someone who can be entirely hers, someone who will never — can never — leave. There are moments that broadcast this turn toward horror, by revealing who Asami really is, in absolutely masterful ways.
As violent and visceral as Audition gets by the end, one of the most horrific moments in the entire film comes when Aoyama calls her and there is a shot of her sitting on the floor, head hung low, frozen, revealing that she has simply been sitting by the phone, unmoving, waiting for him to call. Then there’s the moment that a strange, huge bag in the background of her apartment lurches and moves on its own, and the reveal of what’s in that bag is outrageously upsetting in the best possible way.
When Audition turns toward outright horror, it’s extremely warranted because it is exactly what the entire film has been building toward. The rom-com moments have happened, they’ve been sweet and awkward, he’s been charmed by her shyness, but those moments are over with. It would be one very simple thing to have her learn of his deception and not take it well, to get the perverse catharsis of so many women who have been misled by men in so many movies, but that’s not what Audition does. Asami doesn’t even necessarily care that he’s been lying to her, that their entire relationship was based on a scam. All she wants his him, and she wants him to have only her. She wants exactly what he wants, but she takes it to such a literal extreme that it only highlights how absurd his expectations were. He wanted her to be dependent only on him. She is going to make him dependent only on her.
Asami is exactly what guys like this think they want until they actually get it. She is a woman who would otherwise be discarded for being “clingy,” thrown out when a romantic partner inevitably discovers that behind ever beautiful face there’s a real person. Asami won’t be abandoned again, and the lengths she goes to in order to assure she’s the only thing in his life are where this becomes one of the most horrifying, disturbing and ultimately riveting movies ever made.
The last act of Audition requires a fairly strong stomach, and it’s not even necessarily what’s shown (although Miike has never been too shy about showing) so much as the mood and tone of the whole thing. It is a torturous experience in the most literal way possible. But I would recommend sticking with it even if you don’t think you can, because it’s the crux of the entire movie, and it is as haunting and tragic as it is stomach churning. Audition is so restrained until the moment that it isn’t, but it walks that tonal tightrope throughout. Asami is one of my favorite villains the genre has ever given us, if you can even call her a villain.
This is a pretty bland opinion even though I love a great deal of the director’s vast filmography, but it is my favorite Takashi Miike film. Audition is absolutely not to be missed if you can handle what it does to your stomach, let alone your nerves. But I honestly simply cannot recommend it enough.
