Chaos theory
>> Takashi Miike’s The City of Lost Souls is
one crazy, incomprehensible movie

by MARK SLUTSKY

Japanese director Takeshi Miike (Audition, Happiness of the Katakuris) has been a real favourite at the Cinéma du Parc lately—it seems like they open a new movie of his every couple of weeks. The latest Miike to show up there, The City of Lost Souls, from 2000, is one crazy film, a Brazilian-Japanese action movie/love story that’s not too easy to follow but nonetheless holds your attention with some completely ridiculous set pieces.

Yeah, The City of Lost Souls sure is one incomprehensible movie. Maybe it’s the inventive editing, or the awkward subtitles (“The damn Brazilian was on TV shouted to conquer us!”), but I couldn’t really figure out what the hell was going on. Apparently, the movie’s about a dude named Mario, a Japanese-Brazilian (played by the single-monickered “Teah”) who’s in love with a Chinese hairdresser (Michele Reis). Teah rescues Reis as she’s about to be deported with the aid of a helicopter and lots of machine-gun rounds. They need money, so they steal a bunch of cocaine during a drug deal, angering both the Chinese and Japanese mobs. With lots of baddies on their trail, they try to flee the country (why Teah rescues Reis from deportation when all they want to do is leave Japan anyway is beyond me).

Okay, so that’s supposed to be what’s going on. What the viewer actually experiences though, in roughly chronological order, is: 1) The crazy helicopter rescue scene. 2) A ridiculous cockfight involving Matrix-style “bullet-time” effects. 3) Much gunplay. 4) Teah fighting a bunch of capoeiristas (a scene that starts promisingly, but cuts away before much fighting is done). 5) A deadly game of ping-pong. And lots else, but those were the scenes that stuck out the most. There’s also an abandoned blind girl mixed up in there somewhere, a Brazilian TV host with a midget cameraman who seem to broadcast out of a shack somewhere, lots of rooster imagery, and many, many characters whose complicated motives aren’t made very clear.

While that might make it seem like The City of Lost Souls is one incredibly exciting movie, it’s actually, strangely, pretty slow-going at times. I can’t really explain why that is, so maybe we’ll just have to chalk it down to the perplexing schematics of the plot and the strange blankness of most of the characters. Reis, in particular—and really, the whole nature of the relationship between her and Teah—are total question marks.

There’s no way, really, to say with confidence whether you’ll like this movie. It’s certainly flamboyant and violent enough to attract a following. And there are some neat scenes, though they’re so choppily edited that it’s often hard to enjoy them. When everything that’s going on on-screen is so chaotic and crazy, it doesn’t help when it’s cut together with such lunatic randomness. Maybe if you get drunk or something before seeing it you’ll have a good time. :

The City of Lost Souls opens Friday, Sept. 20 at Cinéma du Parc

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