Hausu (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
One of my favorite jokes from The Simpsons is in the episode “Krusty Gets Kancelled.” Because Itchy and Scratchy have moved to the new hit Gabbo Show, Krusty is forced to play “Eastern Europe’s favorite cat and mouse team, Worker and Parasite.” A very representative clip of Soviet animation plays and Krusty is as baffled as the audience.
“What the hell was that?”
I think about that scene often whenever watching a foreign piece of media that’s been deemed “weird” by the standards of Western anglophones. It’s Japanese cinema that seems to get tagged as that the most. It’s unfair. The films of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu are universal. There’s an Americanized strain in their art, too. I’ve read enough Haruki Murakami to know that. Okay, sure, Takashi Miike’s a little over the top, but we don’t treat the French in remotely the same way for their extreme films. Besides, every culture has its idiosyncrasies. How am I supposed to explain rolling coal, the firearm stockpiles, and tipping to the rest of the world? I can’t, so why should Japan have to explain it’s most outre nonsense?
But, then again, there’s Hausu.
What the hell was that, indeed.
Hausu is the story of a high school student named Gorgeous. Her widowed father has remarried, so she decides to spend some time at her unmarried aunt’s country estate. She invites her friends Prof, Melody, Kung Fu, Mac, Sweet, and Fantasy on vacation with her.
Anyway, the house is haunted as shit. And not in the Shirley Jackson or Overlook Hotel sense of subtle malevolence, but more in the line of The Piano Will Eat You.
It would be enough if the house itself was actively out to get the students, but the whole film is subsumed in aesthetic weirdness. I’d call it a live action cartoon, but there’s enough actual animation to make that seem inadequate. Other techniques include fades, superimposed images, and intentionally amateurish special effects. Design choices are universally bizarre. Watermelons are perfect spheres here. The characters themselves are blase about their surroundings and situation. There’s a juxtaposition of childlike wonder and humor with gallons of blood and severed fingers.
One interesting aspect of the film beyond its strange visuals and performances is that there’s a feminist bent to the whole proceeding. I’m uncertain if that was intentional on Obayashi’s part, but death of the author and all that. It’s just hard not to look at a film where domesticity itself is literally devouring women and not go, “Oh, that’s a metaphor.” I cannot adequately discuss what the late 1970s were like for women in Japan, but it’s not like could have been all much worse than it was here as they are forced into narrow roles or else isolated like the Gorgeous’s maiden aunt to the outskirts of society. While Hausu is still resolutely more style than substance, it’s nice that there’s at least one thing holding it together.
October 16, 2018
oliveresque 