The outrageous and fantastical Suicide Club was one of my more memorable cinema screenings in the past few years. Here's our correspondent Wells Dunbar on the quasi-sequel. Trailers and a multitude of links appear after the jump at the end of the article.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen Jisatsu saakuru, née Suicide Circle, aka Suicide Club, the 2002 Japanese horror opus from which Noriko's Dinner Table follows. Hoping to catch myself up before it's Sunday night screening, I made my way to Suicide Circle's reliably-spoilerific Wikipedia entry. Was I in for it. Mass suicides! Haunted websites! Nefarious J-Pop groups! By the time this nonsensical-by-half synopsis was over, I was longing to be logged on to cursed BBS haikyo.com instead, with all those little red and white dots.
Settling into the theater, the gargantuan running time (159 minutes ) further exacerbated my fears. Even at its best, atmospheric Asian horror owes an undue amount of dread to long, sparse movements and foreboding quiet time - of which Noriko's Dinner Table contained none. But I was right to fear - Noriko's Dinner Table is infinitely more disturbing, inhabiting an tentative twilight space neither dream nor reality.
The self-contained, enveloping universe created by director Sion Sono blends the askew, forced normalcy of David Lynch with the bruising emotional bluntness of a Lars Von Trier. A lucid haze hangs over the film from its initial seconds, as Noriko peppers us with breakneck, stream-of-consciousness rants.
In no short order we learn the striking teen (Kazue Fukiishi, One Missed Call) has run away to Tokyo, for no real reason other than an ethereal desire to be someone other than herself. She quickly finds the beguiling, serpentine Kumiko, a friend from haikyo.com, who enlists her talents in her odd family support service - right before the fabled 54 schoolgirl suicides that initiate the first film.
But to communicate Noriko's Dinner Table in terms of plot is to do it a disservice. In examining the multifaceted, fractured nature of family in the information age, Sono raises troubling questions. Why does Noriko feel more at home with a fake family than her real one? Can you build a new family of your own, piecemeal, like you'd order a dinner-set online? And, as we're needled repeatedly, are you connected to yourself?
These questions are posed in emotions and tones, often disturbingly dissociative ones. As Noriko transcends her familial history, symbolically severing her umbilical cord and taking a different name, so goes the audience on a similarly self-negating journey. Hers is a pitch-black trip, a complete schism with reality. The incessant narration arising from Noriko, her family and friends only furthers this end, placing the viewer uncomfortably close to their troubled psyches. The dissonance of rote, repetitive melodies laid over especially uncomfortable scenes, and the naturalistic, careening cinematography increases the queasiness still.
By the time the family is reunited around the dinner table, you're so thoroughly decentered it's impossible to tell if what we've seen is real or a dream. As subtly spelled out by haikyo.com, and not-so-subtly by former US Congressman Mark Foley, sometimes it's impossible to tell where online ends and reality begins.
LINKS
Official International Site
Japanese Site
Trailer (YouTube)
Previous Twitch articles here, here, here, and here.
Review by Wells Dunbar
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