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Vibrator
Directed by Ryuichi Hiroki
Starring: Shinobu Terajima, Nao Omori, Riho Makise, Jun Murakami
Script: Mari Akasaka Haruhiko Arai
Original Title: Vibrator
Running Time: 1:35
Country: Japan
Year: 2003
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Japanese cinema has offered its share of provocative fare these last few years, mostly from cult iconoclast director Takeshi Miike (Audition, Dead or Alive, Gozu) and Vibrator looked like an entry into the post-Miike era, ready to explore the road-movie genre with a strong dose of provocation.
While shopping for alcohol at a gas station Rei, a mentally disturbed freelance writer, runs into Takatoshi, a lonely truck driver, and decides to follow him, hoping to find true love. From there, they embark on a journey of sex and mindless talk, as the long and monotonous road unfolds on the screen.
Ryuichi Hiroki shot his film with a grainy and desaturated cinematography. The rhythm is slow, almost contemplative, aiming to extract some urban poetry and rough romanticism from the meeting of these two lonely souls. Trucks and freeways are not exactly the usual romantic settings and Hiroki is clearly trying to work against types, brushing off the clichés of romantic cinema with provocation. But giving your central character a bleached haircut—a trend reminiscent of Miike's own hairdo and of his character Ichi—doesn't assure you some kind of legitimacy; Hiroki confuses his own humorless vulgarity with Miike's ironical taste for provocation. Trying to push the envelop anyway he can, the director multiplies sequences where his heroine is peeing—whether it's on the phone in her kitchen or on the side of the freeway—and offers lots of sexual intercourse, mostly involving oral sex. As edgy as Hiroki tries to be, I couldn't help having the feeling of watching one of these hypocritical Hollywood films. His camera, rather than going for a subtle and more erotic suggestive approach, tries to offer a realistic look before quickly hiding everything behind some well-chosen puritan angles.
With its confined setting—a truck and only two characters—Vibrator officiates like a cinematographic jail we're locked in for 95 long minutes. Building a road-movie around two misfits is a dangerous affair that is sometimes successful—Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66—but here it collapses as not only are we forced to endure the presence of these two blank and uninteresting characters but more painfully we have to listen to their uninspired and empty dialogues that makes the Big Brother house pass for a meeting of Nobel laureates.
At the end of the screening at the Los Angeles film festival, I was surprised to hear a good portion of the small audience applause. Maybe they were just happy to have seen a film in their own language. But it's the reaction of my neighbor that summarized it best . When the credits started rolling, he woke up, lucky to have slept through the whole trip.
Fred Thom
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Vibrator review
