Odishon: Everyone Is Lonely

Loneliness is corrosive. We’re a social species, for whom community is historically an important part of our survival. And even though it might not be as critical to our continued physical survival as it might once have been, depriving someone of that can impact their mental health negatively, and it can become a vicious cycle - the more disconnected we become, the harder it is to reconnect. It’s easy to forget yourself, forget your humanity even, over a long enough stretch of time isolated from everyone else.

And Odishon (Audition) knows this very well. It’s a masterfully made, absolutely harrowing story about loneliness and how it distorts and misshapes us.

It’s been seven years since Shigeharu Aoyama lost his wife Ryoko to a terminal illness. It’s just him and his son Shigehiko, who is now a teenager. Shigeharu does alright for himself in television production, but even his son sees that he’s lost some of the spring in his step, that he looks tired. It’s the time-honored romantic comedy cliché of the child urging their widowed parent to get back up on the horse, to start looking for love again. Shigehiko’s even got a girlfriend of his own, who comes over for study dates and is impressed with his knowledge of dinosaurs. Even his secretary is about to get married. It’s time for Dad to get back out there.

But it’s tough to meet people the older you get. Shigeharu doesn’t want an arranged marriage, he wants something romantic. He wants to meet someone and fall in love, and that’s not the kind of thing you can just make happen, especially as a busy professional. And one night, out at a bar after work, his friend Yasuhisa hits on an idea. See, Yasuhisa works in film, and it wouldn’t be that difficult for him to arrange a casting call for a movie ostensibly in production. Shigeharu will sit in on the auditions, he’ll be able to look over their resumes, get their contact information. Thirty women, see if there are any he likes. He can follow up with them later, and what do you know, it turns out the funding for the film’s been withdrawn. Tough break…but how about having dinner with me? One comic montage later, complete with actresses doing everything from baton-twirling routines to stripping down nude, one quiet, shy young woman stands out to Shigeharu. Her name’s Asami. She’s very quiet, very demure. She trained in classical ballet for 12 years but her hopes of a career were cut short when she injured her hip. Now she gets by working at a friend’s bar three nights a week. Shigeharu is almost immediately smitten.

Yasuhisa isn’t so sure, though. He thinks there’s something…off…about her.

There’s a lot going on here. It’s got the premise of a romantic comedy, but almost right from the start there’s something more astringent about it. Once they agree to their ruse, Shigeharu and Yasuhisa exhibit the conspiratorial chumminess of less overtly misogynistic versions of characters from In The Company Of Men. There are glimmers of conscience and concern, but it doesn’t stop them from going through with what is basically the presentation of thirty women as commodities, as if Shigeharu is selecting a new car, or a pet, or the fish he wants for dinner. And once Shigeharu falls for Asami, he’s as giddy as a schoolboy, which makes sense, since the idea of having a series of women paraded before you so you can pick out your favorite is a deeply juvenile one, It illustrates the idea that in some ways, some men never really grow up, that when it comes to sex and love, Shigeharu isn’t much more mature than his son. He’s happy, he’s got a new lease on life, he’s excited again, and it all seems sincere. There isn’t really any maliciousness or cruelty to him, it really is the headiness of new love, but the lie it’s predicated upon is never really far away. He’s a man who puts his needs first, and doesn’t really give the implications of that much thought.

And then there’s Asami. She is very much someone who seems fine at first glance, but the longer you look and the deeper you look, the clearer it becomes that there’s something very wrong. She’s demure, but demure to the point of utter stillness, almost dissociated (which would make sense given what we will eventually learn about her). Her background doesn’t check out at all - not her employment references, not anything. She’s a total blank. As Yasuhisa observers, he cannot find anyone who actually knows her. There are allusions to a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional family, revealed to be much more and much worse in startling, upsetting flashbacks. She says things like “love only me,” to which Shigeharu readily agrees, not yet realizing how literal she’s being. Asami’s been through a lot from a very young age, and it’s had a profound impact on how she views things like love and connection, abandonment and pain.

The characterization is solid - nobody here really feels two-dimensional. Shigeharu is believable as a man who’s been grieving for a long time, and finds himself excited by the prospect of new love, enough so that he’s willing to overlook some of his qualms at the blatantly unethical way he’s pursuing it. Yasuhisa gives him the idea in the first place, but he also recognizes that his friend isn’t thinking straight and tries to counsel him to be cautious, so both of them are neither wholly unsympathetic nor wholly sympathetic. Like far too many men, they’re otherwise decent people with some pretty serious blind spots when it comes to how they treat women. Asami, from the outside, is just disconcerting enough in speech and manner to be noticeable, but not so much that someone like Shigeharu couldn’t disregard it (and there are some suggestions late in the film that he’s remembered some of their interactions very selectively), and it’s easy to believe her as someone bent into something monstrous by profound abuse and neglect. Shigeharu’s son is your basic heterosexual teenage boy, as interested in dinosaurs as he is in girls, but he doesn’t seem predatory about it. He wants his dad to be happy, he’s starting to discover attraction himself, and that all seems about right.

So it’s a film that’s very much about loneliness. This isn’t even subtextual - at one point, Yasuhisa observes that “everyone is lonely in Japan,” and it sort sets the thesis for everything else. Yes, Asami’s clearly been warped by a childhood filled with abuse to the point that she has real trouble connecting to others, but Shigeharu’s own relative loneliness causes him to ignore his better judgment and disregard some very clear red flags in the things Asami says and how she behaves. That lack of connection estranges people from their sense of self and their good judgment. But it also highlights the idea that there’s lonely, and then there’s lonely. Next to Asami’s utter isolation and disconnection - not just from humanity, but from empathy and healthy boundaries - Shigeharu’s loneliness is very relative. He has a son, coworkers, friends…his loneliness seems more like self-pity compared to the desolation that is Asami’s life and the shape it’s forced her into. We’re introduced to her sitting in her room, staring out the window into the rain, and it’s immediately evocative of someone whose emptiness is total.

And all of this is in service of a story that’s told in an audacious fashion. The film plays a lot with narrative in a few different ways, all to good effect. It begins as a romantic comedy (if you think about it, looking for a spouse under the pretext of auditions for the leading role in a film feels a lot like a rom-com waiting to happen. If you stop to consider it, the implications are appalling, but that’s not unusual for romantic comedies) stem to stern - it’s got the lighthearted, breezy pop soundtrack, a yearning secretary, a no-nonsense housekeeper, and a son urging his dad to get back out there. And then at the end of the first act, the penny drops for the audience in a single scene, as unnerving as it is simple in construction. Now we know for sure that something isn’t right (well, we did anyway, since we’re watching a horror movie), but the film more or less continues as a romantic comedy, even as discordant notes increasingly creep in - as we learn more about Asami (or rather, learn how much we don’t know), as Yasuhisa becomes increasingly concerned by this and urges Shigeharu not to rush into things, while Shigeharu blithely ignores his friend, so strong is his attraction to Asami. The second act has more than a bit of the feeling that Shigeharu is walking toward the edge of a cliff, whistling and looking at the clouds. But it’s still grounded in romantic comedy, where his absentmindedness and willingness to take risks or ignore what’s staring him in the face would read as the dizzy recklessness of new love. But knowing what we know, it reads vert differently, like someone headed toward his doom.

It also plays with narrative visually as well, making inventive use of cutaways to convey beats economically, and flashbacks that mix up time and place - putting the adult versions of characters in situations where they were children and vice versa, and revelations that do the same, turning someone’s process of putting two and two together into a visual recombination of people and places and conversations we’ve already seen that simultaneously suggest the unreliability of memory, the logic of nightmares, and the delusions that accompany extreme ordeal, the wish to be anywhere but here. It jumbles a lot of things up in a way that defies linear storytelling, but it communicates truths nonetheless - there are points where Shigeharu, in terms of the plot, can’t be where he’s shown to be or seeing the things he’s seeing, but nonetheless, it carries the weight of truth. It’s like he’s starting to realize exactly what he’s gotten himself into, as well as having some revelations about his own past behavior, his realizations playing out in front of him and us. He’s almost serving as a proxy for us, showing us the things that have happened even though he wasn’t actually there and things that he did long before the events of this film. And even apart from the inventive use of flashback and dreamlike, hallucinatory revelation, there are a number of moments that are masterfully composed, some haunting, some unsettling, some beautiful, using light and space and the positioning of characters and objects to communicate the emotional states of characters without any words, or to underline exactly how creepy everything is getting.

And then in the third act, it all comes crashing down on him, and he is very much there, and so are we, and has so often been the case in the film up to this point, we are not allowed to look away as Shigeharu learns exactly how much of a mistake he’s made and what the costs are going to be. It’s excruciating to watch, and somehow doesn’t feel at odds with what’s come before - when Asami said he should love nobody except her, that’s exactly what she meant. Other people have told her that they would love her in the past, but they lied. And what Asami has learned is that while other people lie, pain never does. It plays fair in that regard - the film tells us that there’s something off about her, Yasuhisa knows there’s something off about her, it’s clear to us that there’s something off about her, but Shigeharu doesn’t listen, and now this is happening, with the dread inevitability that’s been building the entire time, This film is considered to be a classic of Japanese horror, and there is a very good reason for that.

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