Kairo
The Circuit
Kiyoshi KUROSAWA
Haruhiko KATO
Kumiko ASO
KOYUKI
Shinji TAKEDA
Koji YAKUSHO
Sho AIKAWA
Jun FUBUKI
117 mins.
It's interesting to think what the significance of the horror genre
is in cinema history. It's a genre which is as old as cinema
itself. The very first public screening of a film, the Lumière
brothers' l'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat (1895), stirred one
single emotion in the hearts of its audience: fear. It might be
difficult to think of that minute-long recording as a horror film
by today's standards, but it did exactly what the horror genre is
meant for; it scared the audience. This is the definition of horror
in its purest form, a definition which has become a bit muddled
from decades of abuse at the hands of inferior talents and
profit-minded entrepreneurs.
Where the cheaply made B-horror quickies of the 50s and 60s turned
horror into a laughing stock, the legacy of the 70s and 80s, with
their increasingly graphic portrayal of violence, added the notion
that horror is all about blood and guts. And so cinema's oldest
genre has come to achieve its position at the bottom of the ladder
of respectability, misunderstood by everyone but a tiny handful of
persevering filmmakers.
One of those filmmakers is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. As his breakthrough
film Cure (1997) proved, he is a man who not only knows what the
term "horror cinema" implies, he has the talent to put horror on
screen in its purest form and in the process prove that a horror
film can indeed be a work of art. His approach favours the classic
tools of the cineaste (cinematography, composition, lighting,
editing and sound) over special effects and combines those with
highly effective storytelling, rich in themes and
significance.
Pulse is further proof of his abilities. Its story premise of a
succession of suicides by young internet users becomes a treatise
on contemporary solitude, isolation and discommunication. Though
computers and technology form the central point of the story,
Kurosawa steers clear of the technophobia manifested in such
related American works as Demon Seed (1977 - Donald Cammell), War
Games (1983 - John Badham), The Lawnmower Man (1992 - Brett
Leonard) or Ghost in the Machine (1993 - Rachel Talalay). The
horror lies not in the threat of an almighty, autonomous technology
that might take over or destroy our lives, but in which effects the
presence of technology, and in particular communications technology
like the internet and mobile phones, has on our lives and our ways
of communicating as human beings in society.
Kurosawa emphasises his bleak view by setting the story in a Tokyo
that is desolate, cold and run-down; a city of loneliness and
impending doom that looks like it could fall apart and crumble any
day. Its interiors are filled with shadows that could hide the most
terrible things and where there is light, that light has an
unnatural bleakness, as if the sun had ceased to send its
comforting warmth. Even when the characters walk around in short
sleeves it seems that they are surrounded by cold. After witnessing
all of this, it's not much of a surprise to see the apocalypse that
comes in the film's finale. But its vision of deserted streets full
of burning buildings and dead bodies (one step beyond the similar
ending of Kurosawa's 1999 film Charisma) might not be a true
apocalypse at all, but rather the symbol of ultimate dehumanised
solitude.
Kurosawa's way of employing backgrounds as part of the on-screen
actions deserves special mention. It is at once strikingly
effective and deceptively simple, aided immensely by the camerawork
of Junichiro Hayashi and Meicho Tomiyama's lighting design. Rarely
does the director use the narrow close-up lens so often employed in
American films, which keep backgrounds out of focus and isolate the
character, or rather the star, from his environment. In Kurosawa's
films, character and environment are inseparable, since the
characters are defined by their surroundings. The significance of
these surroundings goes far beyond being a simple décor, to the
point of becoming characters in their own right, breathing, moving
and living, as unpredictable as any of the human characters on
screen.
Pulse is a triumph of effective filmmaking, made by a director who
should be considered one of the most important filmmakers to work
in the horror genre, in Japan or elsewhere. If only he could have
spared us the jarring pop song over the end credits. But that's the
price to pay for making a big budget studio movie, I
guess.
Source
The above is a review of the Japanese version of "Pulse" (Kairo), a
2001 production.
Koyuki (Kairo 2001) was also the female lead cast in Tom Cruise's
"The Last Samurai". Guys may also want to check out the Japan
version of "Pulse" because all three female actresses look great in
their casual wear in the movie.
