The Happiness Of The Katakuris (35mm)
20 St Georges Road, Avondale, Auckland
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Bar open: 7PM
Trailers & shorts: 7:40PM
Main feature: 8PM
2001 / 113 min / R16 Violence
Director: Takashi Miike
Cast: Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda
The Happiness Of The Katakuris is from prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike is a work of inspired madness, and one that is seriously difficult to resist.
A musical remake of the Korean hit The Quiet Family. Miike found the musical to be a genre uniquely equipped to deal with his brand of cinematic anarchism. This movie manages to mock itself at the same time as heightening its sentimental affect.
A middle-aged dad, Masao Katakuri (former teen idol Kenji Sawada), decides to set up a bed and breakfast high in the mountains, as a project to bring his family together. However, he picked a godforsaken spot where there is no major road that leads to their guesthouse, so business is non-existent.
When a guest finally arrives, the family is overjoyed... until they discover their first customer was just looking for a place to commit suicide. Worried that the bad news will spread, Dad convinces the rest of his family to bury the body and pretend like nothing happened. That would be easy enough, except that soon every guest who arrives starts ending up dead and the shallow graves by the lake start overflowing.
Embracing the trash aesthetic, the costumes, songs and acting are all gloriously camp and tacky. And the grandiose musical numbers (and cheesy ’80s music-video choreography), with their clunky lyrics, come at the least appropriate moments - when a corpse is discovered or the dead come back to life.
But despite minor violence and gore, the director shocks us most by the charmingly shambolic way in which he embraces good-old family values.
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