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 he most surprisingly thing about Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure
is just how average it is. The film is a crime drama, and like dozens of other
Japanese crime dramas I’ve seen in the past, Cure follows the formula
to a ‘T.’ The conventions are as follows: a slow, plodding narrative;
characters that do the “Japanese thing” and hide their emotions until it
explodes; long moments of silence interrupted by sudden bursts of violence; and
the whole film is more concern with how it “gets” to the end than actually
getting there. That isn’t to say Cure, a 1997 effort by Kairo
writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, isn’t a worthy film -- it’s just, well,
it’s nothing new, and if you’ve ever seen a “typical” Japanese crime
film, you’ve seen this one.
Cure opens with the brutal murder of a prostitute by
her john; when veteran Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) investigates, he
discovers that the john has no idea why he killed the prostitute. It seems
Takabe has been investing similar acts of murder in the last few weeks, and each
time the murderer seems compelled to kill, but doesn’t know why. Meanwhile, an
amnesiac name Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) appears on a beach where he meets a
mild-mannered schoolteacher. Mamiya seems to have short-term memory and can
barely remember what he said, or what anyone else said, a few seconds after they
said it. It isn’t long before Takabe’s investigation leads him to Mamiya, as
the other man is leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake…
After having every hair on the back of my neck stand up
during 2001’s Kairo, I
was expecting more from this 1997 effort by the same writer/director. To say I
was disappointed wouldn’t exactly be correct, because the plodding narrative
of Cure is not new to me, and I always expect Japanese films to conform
to it (and is surprised only when they don’t). The film is based on a novel by
Kurosawa himself, and is a standard Japanese crime drama. It moves from point A
to point B and eventually reaches point C. There’s very little surprise
in-between, and somehow Kurosawa’s ruminations on person and identity and
memory seems lost in the shuffle of bloody bodies and gore. If there was a point
to Cure, Kurosawa must have lost it during the translation from print to
screen -- that is, if there was ever a notable and worthwhile point to begin
with.
The result is that Cure never really shifts into
gear. It begins slowly and ends the same way. In-between the beginning and end
Kurosawa throws some gruesome murders at us, although they’re always
after-the-fact murders, which means we don’t see the actual crime being
committed, only the gory results. This takes away any potential for thrilling
“stalk” scenes. If nothing else, I at least expected (or needed) those
scenes, but alas, they were not present.
Another problem with Cure is that the Mamiya
character, with his is-he-or-isn’t-he an amnesiac act really got to be
annoying after a while. The character essentially stares glassy-eyed into the
camera and trudges back and forth, showing no energy at all. Granted, his
character is that of a broken-down man with very complex thought patterns and
motives, but that doesn’t make watching him sit there and chatter on endlessly
any less tiresome.
The movie’s one plus is actor Koji Yakusho (Takabe),
whose character’s personal life is actually more interesting than the serial
killer case he’s on. Takabe’s wife is ill, and although the movie never
elaborates on her illness, we can extrapolate that she’s going through
something of an identity crisis, putting a tremendous mental burden on her
husband. The wife’s problems of identity and memory tie into the movie’s
overall themes of self-realization and self-identity.
Cure is a stylish if slightly uninspired film, and
every now and then there are flashes of the brilliance Kurosawa will eventually
showcase in Kairo. Like a
lot of crime films from Japan, the movie relies on long moments of silence
before throwing sudden violence at us. Cure doesn’t always work, mostly
because its themes aren’t all that interesting to anyone but a Japanese
audience, and its violence is uninvolving. Actually, the movie as a whole is
quite uninvolving.
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