SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Didn't care for The Usual Suspects. I don't go to the movies to have the rug yanked out from under me per se, and if I were to tell you an elaborate anecdote only to pull myself out of a corner with "Just kidding," well, that's just witless. (I waited for Bobby Ewing to turn up in the shower as a post-script to The Usual Suspects.) What I ask for in a plot-twist is that it recontextualize--not invalidate--that which preceded it; for this reason I am amenable to the 180s of The Sixth Sense and Psycho but deplore the final hoax of Vanilla Sky. Takashi Miike's Audition (Odishon) probably falls into the Psycho camp most of all in the wicked reversal of a character's orientation, but honestly, the high volume of critics and audience members claiming they didn't see it coming surprises me.

Ryo Ishibashi, a rock star in his native Japan, bears the weight of national melancholy on his shoulders in Audition as Aoyama, a father-of-one widowed when his wife succumbs to a terminal illness. ("The whole of Japan is lonely," an unsympathetic acquaintance tells Aoyama.) Seven years later, his now-teenaged son advises him to remarry; producer colleague Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) couldn't agree more heartily and has a devilish idea: hold auditions for a fictitious project involving a young female lead, with Aoyama choosing his mate from among thirty finalists. Aoyama is immediately intrigued by the touching story of a candidate who goes by Asami (porcelain stunner Eihi Shiina)--in Japan you apparently submit a personal essay upon trying out for a part (if this is an invention of the filmmakers, it's kind of a necessary evil for exposition's sake), and in Asami, a ballet dancer whose career came to a tragic close, Aoyama sees a kindred lost soul.

Aoyama's problem is that he doesn't want to be Asami's husband, he wants to be her white knight. While you can read this as cause-and-effect (wife dies, husband searches for replacement he could potentially save), it's almost incidental--Audition understands that guys often adopt the position of saviour in seeking out new partners. The picture criticizes men on a superficial level through Yoshikawa's hygienic casting-couch scheme to meet women (one actress is even asked to show her breasts upon being told that the role requires nudity), but on a deeper level, by exposing the fatal flaw in male idealism: Asami wants to be nurtured in addition to rescued. It's past the happily-ever-after that men so rarely contemplate; Aoyama and Asami wind up at cross-purposes because, in essence, he yearns to be coddled, too.

I'd love to know how the last fifteen minutes of Audition--among the most daunting in cinematic history--play for an actress. On the one hand, you have the ultimate revenge fantasy for anyone ever subjected to that chair and those group stares of the casting process; on the other, you have a woman basically demonized. A drug hallucination leading up to the climactic confrontation between Aoyama and Asami attempts to justify, inasmuch as one can, all that follows, but its very nature as a dream sequence precludes this. (Miike also keeps Asami's face obscured--with the exception of two or three striking close-ups--until the third act, stunting the development of our attachment to her.) I guess we're left with equal-opportunity cynicism of the genders, which, from my limited experience with the prolific Miike's work (this was the first movie of his that I'd seen), is par for the Miike course, if Audition's low-key visuals are not. A fertile film.

Ventura has released Audition in two editions on DVD in association with the American Cinematheque. If you're squeamish, I'd suggest avoiding the film altogether rather than opting for the R-rated version over the "Unrated Director's Cut"--you're as bad as Asami if you'd prefer to view the picture in a castrated form! (This review pertains to the "Unrated Director's Cut" disc.) Ventura's 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation of the film looks good, though the image has a PAL-to-NTSC quality, for lack of a precise term, in a barely perceptible frame delay as well as a certain softness of detail, colour, and contrast. The 5.1 Japanese Dolby Digital soundmix (complete with removable English subtitles) takes full advantage of the six-track environment during the aforementioned nightmare but in few places besides.

Supplementing the film are an interview, a commentary excerpt, and more. Grilled by Dennis Bartok and "Chris D." for twenty-four minutes at the American Cinematheque Theatre, Miike's answers were dubbed for this DVD, as was his amusing yakker for the final thirty-two minutes of Audition. Within these extras, Miike reveals such tidbits as the mild-mannered Ishibashi's double-life as a music idol in the Mick Jagger mold, the origin of Asami's creepy taunt that English ears hear as "deep deep deep deep deep," the screenplay's more radical departures from Ryu Murakami's source novel, and so on.

The interesting but cheesy 9-minute featurette "History of the Egyptian Theatre", hosted by Heull Howser, provides an overview of the building's recent restoration, while a photo gallery that frames each production still as if the reading of an LCD viewfinder (adhering to the DVD's nifty menu conceit), trailers for Everything Put Together, Mansion of the Black Rose, Blackmail is My Life, The City of Lost Souls, The Happiness of the Katakuris, and international/Japanese trailers for Audition (both spoiler-laden), and liner notes (including a detailed combination biography-filmography for Miike) written by Chris D. round out the disc and its handsome gatefold.-Bill Chambers