Fantastic Fest 2019: Takashi Miike Gets The Job Done In FIRST LOVE

Smiling before a packed house, Takashi Miike opens up the US Premiere of his latest, First Love, by thanking the audience–only to apologize. “I’m sorry,” he begins. “There aren’t as many heads rolling in this film.” He wasn’t kidding. In the slim 108 minute runtime, only two heads roll, a shockingly low number for his gory filmography.

First Love is what I can only describe as a Yakuza rom-com. It follows the tale of an orphaned boxer, Leo, who receives the unfortunate news that he is dying due to a brain tumor, right before he stumbles into a young woman, Monica, who’s been abducted by the Yakuza to pay off her father’s debts. Violent confusion ensues as the nascent couple is thrust into a gang war that culminates in an epic afterhours fight in a hardware store.

Same Old Song & Bloody Dance

The set-up’s fundamental elements are pretty classic, wont to go anywhere–and boy, do they go everywhere. Like much of Miike’s work, First Love mixes and matches generic elements freely and playfully, making it impossible to pin down into one category. Take any fight scene and you might think it’s a standard Yakuza action flick. But take any sequence in which the specter of Monica’s abusive father follows her through the streets of Tokyo and you might think it’s a horror.

Of course, stick it out till the scene where Monica’s hallucination of her father starts dancing in his underwear on a subway and you will realize that this, more than anything, is a cheeky comedy that is not afraid to get dark.

Leo and Monica are, unfortunately, the weakest links in an otherwise colorful cast of characters. Though they grow more compelling as the story nears its surprisingly tranquil conclusion, they never shape up to the rest, especially Monica who, beyond her hallucinations, is never given much to do or say.

The others are great though. There’s Julie, Monica’s captor, who is out on the hunt for the mysterious hitman who murdered her boyfriend. There’s Otomo, a corrupt and incompetent cop who confiscates drugs from criminals before selling them himself. Finally, there is my favorite, Kase, a Yakuza soldier who is trying really hard not to kill anyone he doesn’t need to. To put it simply, he fails at this goal.

Tonally, the film feels somewhat unbalanced at first, unsure of whether it wants to play on its more emotional and genuine currents. But once Leo and Monica crash into each other’s lives, it loses any pretensions of drama and fully embraces its own comic affect. The depletion of emotionality from the rest of the film is by no means an issue in and of itself, it just takes time for the audience to grasp the sharply shifting tone, to find permission to laugh.

As soon as we’re in the clear though, we laugh hard and honest. There’s profound joy in seeing good people navigate a bad world that’s tearing itself to shreds around them. As each faction in the gang war picks the other out, we find solace in two lost souls making their way to safety through the blood-soaked halls of a hardware store. Miike’s more eccentric impulses rarely inhibit his penchant for catharsis.

In the Shadow of 100 Giants

It is true that First Love doesn’t stay with you the same way some of Miike’s more recent work does (for example, it lacks the unhinged frenzy of Yakuza Apocalypse or the epic scale of Blade of the Immortal), but that doesn’t stop it from being a riveting entry on its own. Watching the film, however, it was impossible not to think of the rest of Miike’s overwhelming body of work. This is a common feeling I experience with most of his films. We should be used to his manic output by now, and yet, every new entry still demands pause: just how does he keep doing it? To call Japanese legend prolific would be a comic understatement.

For the uninitiated, Miike began his feature film directing career in the early 90s. Since then, he has churned out over a hundred films. That’s an average of about four a year. First Love is his 103^rd credit. The fact that he can still crank out entertaining work at all is not just a testament to his stamina, but to the pure, coveted joy he finds in his craft. I don’t know the man, but I can’t imagine he’s in it for the money. He’s certainly not in it for the prestige.

But there was another reason why I kept his work close to mind. In honor of his newest, the festival screened one of his most beloved, the 2001 The Happiness of the Katakuris, a surreal musical comedy about a family with very bad luck who owns a bed and breakfast in the countryside by Mount Fuji.

In addition to the hyper-performative musical numbers and whacky mysterious deaths, the film also slides in and out of claymation sequences that feature hellish pixies being eaten by crows–or something, it’s hard to explain.

First Love: Conclusion

The festival brought Miike up on stage again to introduce Happiness, and he began by paying tribute to its actors who are no longer with us, Kiyoshiro Imawano and Tetsurō Tamba, before assuring us that they “did not die because of the stress of making this film.” The festival then bestowed upon Miike their 4^th ever Fantastic Fest Lifetime Achievement Award, which he warmly accepted, beaming.

It’s easy to sit back and just marvel at the audacity of such an output from a man who hasn’t even hit 60. And that’s exactly what we did. In both screenings. In a Q&A, an audience member asked: “How do you get your ideas?” A stupid question in any other circumstance, but perfectly valid here. Miike didn’t hesitate to answer: “It’s my job.”

First Love premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17 2019 and screened at Fantastic Fest on September 19 2019.