Haze

Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Starring Shinya Tsukamoto and Kaori Fujii

Haze plunges the viewer into a raw portrayal of physical pain and the wretchedness of a tortured mind. Filming in a confined space, the main protagonist, played by Tsukamoto himself, tries to crawl and tear his way out of a claustrophobic maze filled with bizarre apparatus of torture. Watching Haze is a raw and exhausting experience for the viewer.

Using a digital camera with considerable skill, Tsukamoto manages to capture the closeness and potency of bodily trauma, forcing the viewer to feel every agony of the character, every bead of glistening sweat and strained muscle. A camera that pushes close to his face catches the soundless scream seen only in his eyes. At one point he has to open his mouth, stretch his jaw and bite into a wide pipe to drag his body along. The piercing sound of his teeth grating on metal makes edgy viewing. His dirty blood stained hands desperately feel their way around a small coffin like space, looking for an opening, a way out of the darkness, whilst he bleeds from a mysterious wound in his stomach.

The man struggles with his identity and memory, his mind searching for a reason for his strange imprisonment.

Travelling through one tunnel he peers through a wall and sees a group of men standing, their demeanour is subservient, their eyes closed, their hands touch their bodies as though wrestling with an unknown affliction. Their hands are raised together in prayer. Within seconds their bodies are ripped apart by an unseen force, their flesh torn into pieces and scattered on the ground.

The images are brutal.

He finds a girl who is curled alongside the mangled bodies of the dead. She says she remembers a room, a TV showing a still of a town, she recalls a desperate feeling of loneliness, an emotion that seems to terrify her, through this scant but revealing dialogue, tiny clues about the characters previous lives are revealed, lives of great emptiness that they both longed to escape from.

The man says ‘even if we get out of here there is nothing spectacular waiting for us.”

After witnessing the hideous visions of the underground chamber, the thought of leaving now fills him with as much dread as staying, he his frozen in place. The girl touches his face, comforting him, their hands clasp. The girl believes she has found a way out and she moves away, even though he is fearful he follows her, and when she dives into bloody waters filled with carcasses, he also travels underwater.

He finds a hatch. He bangs his head violently against, screeching it until it opens slightly, for the first time a thin gleam of warm light seeps into the darkness.

Haze explores the connection between the physical body and human consciousness. In order to bring our attention to consciousness in both Vital and Haze, Tsukamoto uses the protagonist’s lack of memory to focus on the immediate consciousness of the characters.

It is also a film about two people who have lost the will to live and the mere act of existing has become strenuous. The horrors of the maze or prison could easily represent the desperateness and torturous caverns of their individual subconscious. In the final images we see the man, now elderly stepping out into the garden, he raises his head to the sunlight, pressing his face into a fresh white sheet that hangs drying in the sun. This sheet represents a new beginning, a new way of life and hope. You can feel his appreciation for the simple pleasures of life and the feeling of being alive, but to arrive at this position he has had to travel through a barbaric underground of bludgeoned souls carrying with him a backbreaking burden of psychological and material injuries.

This film began as a twenty-thirty minute digital film that was eventually extended to fifty minutes. In the interview that you will find on the DVD, Tsukamoto says he felt freer using a digital camera especially focusing on the movements of the characters. Haze expresses the power of digital filmmaking, revealing just what the digital medium is capable of using only a few characters and the imagination of a first-class director. Kaori Fujji’s presence in the film is compelling, her face reveals so much inner turmoil and she admits in an interview that the film was a personal journey for her.

The music fits perfectly and in time with each scene, thundering and clashing as the character battles, dreamy and yet hypnotic in the calmer moments of the film.

Notes by Roseanna Lawrence © 2007 Roseanna.Lawrence@minadream.com