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Visitor Q (DVD)

Reviewed by: syntaxcoma Has Written 1 Review BTRs
Reviewed on: 16-Feb-2007

Description

Made on a budget of $70,000, filmed on digital tape in one week, and banned in several countries, Visitor Q (Internation name: Bizita Q) is not at all that it seems to be on paper. There is nothing pornographic about Visitor Q, as there is nothing pornographic about a car crash or childhood leukemia or dental floss.

Now on to the film, and let me preface this by saying, as long as you can watch pain on film, this movie will be palatable, and maybe even enjoyable.
At the core, it is about the anti-traditional Japanese family unit.. Kiyoshi (Kenichi Endo) is the father of the Yamazaki family. A shamed reality TV journalist, he's sort of been sent to Coventry, on forced vacation, and he has this mission in life: make the ultimate TV documentary about sex and violence among the youth of Japan. Of course, being a father in a Takashi Miike film, he ends up in a Japanese whorehouse having sex with his runaway daughter who is one of the 'good time girls'. His wife Keiko (Shungiku Uchida) is a heroin addict and not averse to prostitution as a way to pay for her multiple daily drug injections. To add insult to injury, her teenage son beats her black and blue, night and day with anything that comes to hand, resulting in her having a constant limp from the domestic abuse. Are you sold yet?

Well, this film goes much deeper than these shocking scenes and their extreme representation of the dysfunctional family at its most grotesquely explicit and excruciatingly intimate. And the way these events are shown by Miike are humorous on a very primitive level.

Incest, necrophilia, rape, and just about every bodily fluid play a part in this tale. The oddness of the film is in it's attempt to convey how banal a Japanese family can be despite various circumstances. Just to give you a clue, some of these circumstances are
1) A bed-wetting son beating his mother with anything he can find.
2) A mother and daughter who are shameless prostitutes.
3) An inept, cheating, cowardly father who had been 'victimized' by hoodlum youths with a microphone.
4) Necrophilia while injecting drugs.
5) The mother standing in the kitchen lactating in puddles, while her son swims in it and 'Q' sits cross-legged in a corner, with an umbrella.
6) 'Q' beating the father over the head with a brick for no apparent reason.

And the list goes on and on.
And that is essentially where the movie begins, when Visitor 'Q' arrives. 'Q' enters the household and acts as a catalyst of depravity. I won't spoil the ending, no matter how badly I want to. The narrative is pretty linear and easy to understand. However, the movie is so extremely taboo that you watch it for all the wrong reasons and like it for all of the right ones. Recommended for fans of Takashi Miike and extreme Asian cinema. Those faint of heart should stay clear of this one.