Three...Extremes is an Asian shock-cinema sampler that might leave the uninitiated wondering what all the fuss is about. This compendium of short works by an all-star team of Oriental directors - Hong Kong's Fruit Chan, Korea's Chanwook Park (or Park Chanwook if you prefer), Japan's Takashi Miike - gives barely a taste of what these filmmakers have to offer, a nibble of the frenzied energies, the sadism, the existential nuttiness that makes extreme Asian film so perversely amusing to those who are into that sort of thing.
The first short, Dumplings, is by the least well-known of the directors, Fruit Chan, but is probably the most successful in pure storytelling terms. It's about a fading TV star who, in search of a youth-potion, something to make her alluring again to her Anderson Cooper-looking husband, becomes a customer of the pretty but devilish Aunt Mei (played with a measure of restraint by exhibitionist wacko Bai Ling), who offers magic dumplings (they look like fleshy objects made from vagina-molds) stuffed with chopped-up aborted fetuses as a cure for being over-the-hill. This idea, the witch who serves children in her dumplings, has a dark fairy tale quality, which Fruit Chan has the good sense to not play up in literalistic fashion; he attacks his unnerving, repugnant story the only way it can be attacked, head-on, playing chicken with good taste, the audience's gag-reflex, etc., The story's real subject is narcissism, the vanity of the TV star with her feminine-but-business-like outfits, her red designer hand-bag, how she's willing to do anything to stay young, what this says about the mania for youth and sustained sexual drive in today's culture. The real "magic" of the fetus-dumplings is that, in eating them, one goes so far past any recognizable limit that it then becomes a breeze to be assertive in bed, no longer sweat small stuff like not being as attractive as you used to. There's a Cronenbergian dimension to this fable, the horror of the body in a state of violation, the fetus as a kind of parasite. It's determinedly repulsive.
The second episode, Chanwook Park's Cut, begins with one of the crazier images around: a man stands motionless in the middle of a big, sparsely decorated apartment, his neck being nibbled by a pale, garishly attired vampiress; the camera circles the two figures until we realize the man is, literally, frozen solid, a human popsicle. This audacious opening is probably the best thing in all of Three...Extremes; the story it leads into, the travails of a movie director who's kidnapped by a psychotic extra and forced to watch as his wife has her fingers lopped off one-by-one, alas does not live up to it. Dumplings may be a fairy tale, but Cut is more of a sick joke, a little in the tradition of Park's Oldboy (the director must spend half his life dreaming up outlandishly elaborate revenge scenarios) but not as staggering in its elegant disjointedness. Given Park's talent for manipulating space and time, it's a tad disappointing that he chooses to restrict himself mainly to this Chamber Drama set-up, one room and a few actors, the opportunity to compose a few bizarre tableaux along the way (a guy restrained by a super-sized rubber-band, a girl at a piano with her fingers held in place by wires like the victim of a giant arachnid). Park goes after his favorite theme of ensnarement, how people are driven to act by forces beyond their control; the room becomes a microcosm of Park's world, one where people become each other's puppet-masters, fueled by class anger, envy, the thirst for retribution. After the feast of Oldboy, Cut feels like lukewarm left-overs.
And speaking of leftovers, that's about all that remains by the time we get to the third segment, Takashi Miike's Box, some tripe about an ex-circus performer (the delicately beautiful Kyoko Hasegawa) beset by ghosts from her past, some horrible guilt about murdering her sister, circus imagery made slightly more interesting by its Japanese flavor but still feeling like Jodorowski on sedatives thanks to Miike's deliberate pacing, his utter indifference to story, sense, audience patience. The guy who gave us the chick drowning in a kiddie pool filled with her own excrement, the chick who fell in love with a guy's penis so much she kept it with her after he was dead, and the dude who slashed his own cheeks so he could open his mouth wider and swallow people's heads whole might've been expected to provide the piece de resistance, but offers instead the dud finale. Maybe it's the old story of the showy actor who underplays to get attention; Miike has such a reputation for outrageousness that he figured the only cool thing would be to play against type, not splash blood all over the place, show people torturing each other in outlandish ways, have main characters sprout weapons in place of their appendages in lieu of a proper ending. Three...Extremes, as one might have predicted, is uneven, only spottily satisfying as a shock-cinema experience.
The first short, Dumplings, is by the least well-known of the directors, Fruit Chan, but is probably the most successful in pure storytelling terms. It's about a fading TV star who, in search of a youth-potion, something to make her alluring again to her Anderson Cooper-looking husband, becomes a customer of the pretty but devilish Aunt Mei (played with a measure of restraint by exhibitionist wacko Bai Ling), who offers magic dumplings (they look like fleshy objects made from vagina-molds) stuffed with chopped-up aborted fetuses as a cure for being over-the-hill. This idea, the witch who serves children in her dumplings, has a dark fairy tale quality, which Fruit Chan has the good sense to not play up in literalistic fashion; he attacks his unnerving, repugnant story the only way it can be attacked, head-on, playing chicken with good taste, the audience's gag-reflex, etc., The story's real subject is narcissism, the vanity of the TV star with her feminine-but-business-like outfits, her red designer hand-bag, how she's willing to do anything to stay young, what this says about the mania for youth and sustained sexual drive in today's culture. The real "magic" of the fetus-dumplings is that, in eating them, one goes so far past any recognizable limit that it then becomes a breeze to be assertive in bed, no longer sweat small stuff like not being as attractive as you used to. There's a Cronenbergian dimension to this fable, the horror of the body in a state of violation, the fetus as a kind of parasite. It's determinedly repulsive.
The second episode, Chanwook Park's Cut, begins with one of the crazier images around: a man stands motionless in the middle of a big, sparsely decorated apartment, his neck being nibbled by a pale, garishly attired vampiress; the camera circles the two figures until we realize the man is, literally, frozen solid, a human popsicle. This audacious opening is probably the best thing in all of Three...Extremes; the story it leads into, the travails of a movie director who's kidnapped by a psychotic extra and forced to watch as his wife has her fingers lopped off one-by-one, alas does not live up to it. Dumplings may be a fairy tale, but Cut is more of a sick joke, a little in the tradition of Park's Oldboy (the director must spend half his life dreaming up outlandishly elaborate revenge scenarios) but not as staggering in its elegant disjointedness. Given Park's talent for manipulating space and time, it's a tad disappointing that he chooses to restrict himself mainly to this Chamber Drama set-up, one room and a few actors, the opportunity to compose a few bizarre tableaux along the way (a guy restrained by a super-sized rubber-band, a girl at a piano with her fingers held in place by wires like the victim of a giant arachnid). Park goes after his favorite theme of ensnarement, how people are driven to act by forces beyond their control; the room becomes a microcosm of Park's world, one where people become each other's puppet-masters, fueled by class anger, envy, the thirst for retribution. After the feast of Oldboy, Cut feels like lukewarm left-overs.
And speaking of leftovers, that's about all that remains by the time we get to the third segment, Takashi Miike's Box, some tripe about an ex-circus performer (the delicately beautiful Kyoko Hasegawa) beset by ghosts from her past, some horrible guilt about murdering her sister, circus imagery made slightly more interesting by its Japanese flavor but still feeling like Jodorowski on sedatives thanks to Miike's deliberate pacing, his utter indifference to story, sense, audience patience. The guy who gave us the chick drowning in a kiddie pool filled with her own excrement, the chick who fell in love with a guy's penis so much she kept it with her after he was dead, and the dude who slashed his own cheeks so he could open his mouth wider and swallow people's heads whole might've been expected to provide the piece de resistance, but offers instead the dud finale. Maybe it's the old story of the showy actor who underplays to get attention; Miike has such a reputation for outrageousness that he figured the only cool thing would be to play against type, not splash blood all over the place, show people torturing each other in outlandish ways, have main characters sprout weapons in place of their appendages in lieu of a proper ending. Three...Extremes, as one might have predicted, is uneven, only spottily satisfying as a shock-cinema experience.