Cure
At a glance...
- Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
- Released in 1997
- Runtime 111 minutes
- Watched at a friend's
- Final feelings: Haunting and compelling to its core!
Cure is another one of those movies that simply tells you textually everything that it's about. At the same time, it feels mysterious, alien, and unknowable until at some point, the pieces all come together and you see yourself in the film. You see your own rage at the injustices of the world, the injustices that have been put specifically against you. You feel the weight of every personal grievance and structural illness that just grinds the you out of your body. We live in alienation. We live in constant groveling with our jobs, our landlords, our families. We're all teetering on the edge of something unspeakable.
What if someone, living in such a world, finally woke up one day and lost themselves? And could articulate that kind of nihilism in such a way that it seemed convincing, even natural, to you? (To me?) What would it mean to be pushed to the boundaries of polite society by the very politeness you need to be adhering to? And what would happen if, one time, you stepped over the line?
Cure is operating on so many different levels and it excels in all of them. This is a movie that succeeds in being about everything because it's seeing the connections between all those things to make them whole. It seamlessly mutates itself around all these broken pieces of modernity. When it needs to be, it's about marriage as a completely broken institution. When it needs to be, it's about the complete failure of capitalism and bourgeois professionalism to make us happy, or even avoid traumatizing us. When it needs to be, it's about the pure malice of psychiatry as a profession, of the idea of pathologizing behaviors as a means of maintaining some kind of order. And in my first viewing, it always comes back to the endless gravitational pull of reactionary violence.
Because ultimately that is what Takabe is. More than anything, he is a reactionary. He has a broken marriage. He feels deep resentment for the constant care that his sick(?) wife demands. He has a shit job that takes everything out of him for no reward. He is so delusional about where his problems lie that he thinks by separating his work and home self completely, he can alleviate his suffering. I know this because the movie literally tells me that he feels this. And when faced with this adversary who simply refuses to engage with him on his terms, who will not simply cooperate with his own criminal conviction, who refuses to let society walk all over him for a convenient resolution to horrific crimes, what does Takabe say?
"It's all your fault! If you weren't here, everything would be good!" In this singular moment, Takabe reveals himself as motivated purely by grievance. Even the grisly murders he is trying to solve are not moral crises that weigh on his conscience, they are mere inconveniences at work that are overstaying their welcome. He is enraged because they should be gone, they should be fixed, someone should be locked up! He has the guy in front of him! The guy he knows killed those people, somehow, with some method he can't replicate and has never seen, but he knows. He is a microcosm of the whole world he embodies. He's the perfect little worker, he's the perfect silent husband, he is the perfect cop, and he is smoldering with rage. I think one valid interpretation of the ending is that Takabe proves himself correct.
The use of perspective in this film just fuels every aspect I've written here. The murders are always distant in these wide-angle shots. You see every step leading up to the faithful pull of the trigger. Your perspective is objective and calm because the people on-screen are objective and calm. This is not something they are deciding to do. This is the natural conclusion of the way things are. There are multiple lines of dialogue in this film that support this idea that the violence is a consequence, it is not a choice, and therefore the targets and victims are natural, as well. The camera is not your ally in this film.
Nor is the edit! There is this particular moment at the end that uses the edit to sort of flag the complete downfall of Takabe and I thought at first it was a skip in the movie?? I'm still learning to notice/observe editing in movies when I watch them for the first time, I tend to get lost in the writing, the characters, and the camera on my first go. But this movie does do so much with duration, with empty time and space, with gradually revealing things. What you see of each murder slowly increases, and as it happens you start to notice more and more the textures of ambient noise that are just a little bit too loud. I actually thought of Jacques Tati's Playtime after watching this, as both films pay special attention to how noisy modernity is. Where Tati approaches with a reticent playfulness, Kurosawa grinds you down mentally, as if to say, "you cannot escape this noise!".
This feels like a movie you can watch forever. Cure is speaking to nearly every single component of our modern civil society. We are all struggling day-by-day to maintain a status quo that is not real, our lives dominated by decaying institutions that have been built up over generations. Maybe someday we will live in a world where Cure does not resonate with us, and thus terrify us. Someday, we may live in a world where Mamiya is lost of all his power. I suppose you can say that by then, we will have been cured, of what I am not sure. Until that happens, this movie will always be there to haunt you, and invite you in, with greusome clarity.
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