Gozu

Gozu is Japanese for "cow head" and identifies a figure that appears in this 2003 film by Takishi Miike.  The movie is a labyrinth and, I suppose, the title is justified by the cow-headed monster, a sort of friendly minotaur that inhabits the movie's narrative maze.  Certain elements of Gozu can be interpreted in a limited way, but, in large part, the film is inscrutable -- the picture displays a vice of all dream-narratives:  this imagery feels intensely meaningful to the dreamer but, usually, this impression of significance can not be successfully conveyed to the person to whom the dream is recounted:  it's simply too private and the atmosphere of dream, congested, even, turgid with meaning, doesn't translate well to a realistic "photographic" medium.  As a consequence, Gozu, a picture that feels like a literal transcript of a dream seems immensely long, weirdly prosaic for much of its two-hours and nine minutes running time, and, ultimately, is in danger of evaporating into colorful mist without establishing any foothold in our imagination.

So far as I can decipher the film, Gozu concerns two Yakuza brothers, Ozaki and Minami.  One or both of the brothers seems to be losing his mind in the opening ten minutes of the picture.  They perceive a small dog, a Pekinese, as a "Yakuza-killing dog" and bludgeon the little creature to death.  Imagining an oncoming car to be a "Yakuza-killing" vehicle, they flee wildly and crash with the result that Ozaki is killed.  For a time, Minami carts the body around but when he stops at restaurant for a meal, the corpse vanishes.  Minami receives inscrutable messages that tell him to take his brother to the dump, presumably to be disposed-of in that place.  But the source of the message is unclear and Minami can't ever quite find his way to the dump; an increasingly surreal series of obstacles confronts him and film slides into a sort of paralysis.  People speak to one another in banal gibberish in long scenes, each two or three minutes in duration -- the takes are composed at medium range and show clogged Japanese rooms, mostly commercial spaces in which people seem to be ceaselessly debating things like whether is really hot or really cold.  Minami encounters various figures that seem to be guides, Pscyhopomps, apparently -- there is a man with half his face painted chalk-white in a sort of lunar pattern, a brother and sister who operate what seems to be a haunted inn (the woman is lactating and milk runs down her thighs and calves) and, ultimately, the Gozu, or cow-headed figure who offers the protagonist a glass of milk.  Minami keeps ending up in the same places, although these locations become increasingly strange as the film progresses -- the haunted restaurant turns out to have a hidden third floor, for instance.  The film's rhythm is very slow, deliberately and tediously impeded.  Minami can't make any progress; in effect, he is running frantically in slow-motion.  As in some of Kafka's novels of this sort, for instance, The Trial, Minami encounters various people with strange, concealed agendas as well as several sexually voracious women.  After many peculiar occurrences, Minami finally reaches the dump where he finds that his brother has been placed in a white car and, then, crushed to raspberry-colored pulp.  But not to worry -- a beautiful young girl appears in the backseat of Minami's convertible and announces that she is his brother.  Minami and his brother, now a girl, confront a mob boss.  The mob boss fancies having sex with a spoon rammed up his rectum, apparently, some form of prostate massage.  Minami and the girl seduce the gangster and kill him by impaling the boss on his spoon -- it's a ladle with a three-foot handle -- and, then, anally electrocuting the bad guy (they apply a broken lamp with exposed wires to the metal spoon.)  Minami, then, has incestuous sex with his sister.  Her vagina clamps down hard on Minami's penis and, when he finally breaks free, he discovers a small hand reaching out of her womb.   The hand belongs to his long-lost brother Ozaki who is born from the woman in a gory and protracted scene that resembles the "body-horror" of David Cronenberg's earlier films.  The film has a purportedly happy ending -- the woman survives the bloody birthing of an entire, fully grown adult male through her vaginal canal and the three are last seen strolling down the streets of Tokyo, seemingly, in a happy mood. 

I suppose a second viewing of the picture would reveal patterns in the apparently random and bizarre events comprising the first three-quarters of this film.  The film shows that beneath the façade of Yakuza tough-guy there is a hysterical bisexual undercurrent that is, also, intrinsically infantile -- I assume the milk imagery has something to do with the desire to return to the womb, an recursion that Ozaki, apparently, achieves.  In one scene, we see the lavishly tattooed skins of murdered Yakuza mobsters hanging like suits in plastic bags.  These skins are like cocoons holding souls that are, apparently, fluid with respect to identity and can be reincarnated in various forms.  I presume that elements of the film relate to Buddhist and Shinto themes and there is clearly some kind of reincarnation underway with respect to Ozaki.  (Wikipedia tells me that Gozu names a demonic guardian spirit of the Underworld, a kind of Asian Charon -- "Ox-head.") Notwithstanding the film's bizarre imagery, it seems tedious, weirdly complicated, with way too many frustrating false endings -- typical of many Japanese films, the movie has a peculiar way of moving toward closure:  it seems to end about a half-dozen times and, then, reboots -- it's as if the film can't exactly grope its way toward its conclusion, that it is as lost as its wandering, demented protagonist.