Visitor Q
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| Visitor Q | |
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| Directed by | Takashi Miike |
| Written by | Itaru Era |
| Starring | Kenichi Endo Shungiku Uchida Kazushi Watanabe |
| Music by | Kôji Endô |
| Editing by | Yasushi Shimamura |
| Distributed by | CineRocket |
| Release date(s) |  Mar 10, 2001 |
| Running time | 84 min |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Budget | ¥7,000,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
Visitor Q (ビジターＱ Bijitā kyū?) is a controversial 2001 film directed by cult Japanese director Takashi Miike. It was filmed as the sixth and final part of the Love Cinema series consisting of six straight-to-video releases by independent filmmakers via a brief but exclusive run at the minuscule Shimokitazawa cinema in Tokyo. The six films were conceived as low budget exercises to explore the benefits afforded by the low-cost Digital Video medium such as the increased mobility of film and the low-lighting conditions available to the filmmakers.
Visitor Q often replicates the style of documentary footage and home movies, which invokes a sense of realism that contradicts the film’s more bizarre elements and black comedy.
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[edit] Plot
The film's plot is often compared to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema, in which a strange visitor to a wealthy family seduces the maid, the son, the mother, the daughter and finally the father before leaving a few days after, subsequently changing their lives.
The story focuses on a few days within a dysfunctional Japanese family. The father, a failed TV reporter, is having an incestuous affair with his prostitute daughter. In an attempt to turn his professional career around, he decides to make his son the main subject of his documentary on the hopelessness of youth. A punching bag for his classmates, the son deals with his troubles by beating up his mother. In turn, the mother turns to heroin and prostitution.
Then an unnamed young man is introduced in their lives, making an entrance by inexplicably knocking the father on the head with a rock and following him home. The visitor moves in with the family bringing further chaos into the family's already twisted routine. After a series of excessive and disturbing events, harmony in the family is restored.
The film starts off with the Question "Have you ever done it with your Dad?"; the viewer then sees Miki Yamazaki, a young prostitute trying to persuade her father, Kiyoshi into having sex with her. Her father is video taping the scene for a documentary he is preparing on Japanese youths. Once it appears the father is letting himself be persuaded, she tells him the price (50,000 Yen). They have sex, the father ejaculates after a very short time and the disappointed daughter informs him it will be 100,000 Yen now, because of this. The father then realises the camera has been on all along.
In the next scene called "Have you ever been hit on the head?", a man (the Visitor) hits the father over the head with a rock for no apparent reason.
The film then moves on to a scene entitled "Have you ever hit your mom?". In this scene the mother is doing a jigsaw puzzle, her hands have red marks on them where she was beaten. Her young son, Takuya, comes in and starts throwing things at the already broken apartment walls because he is unhappy with the toothbrush his mother bought him. He then hits his mother with a cane. Later, bullies from the son's school come to the front of the house and fire fireworks through the son's bedroom window. The mother is later seen injecting heroin. It does not seem to have a huge effect on her, though, suggesting she is a regular user.
On his way back from work the father is yet again hit on the head by the same man. They both arrive at the father's home and the mother serves them dinner. The son comes down while they are eating and starts beating the mother again. This does not surprise or bother the father or the Visitor.
The next day the father is on his way to work when he sees his son being beaten and robbed by some children from school. He films it from a distance and appears very pleased with the footage.
The mother meanwhile is getting ready for work. The viewer discovers her body is covered in marks from where the son whipped her. She also has a limp.
The father meets with a female co-worker who believes he is going too far in his work. The mother, working as a prostitute, is whipping a customer with a belt (at his request). She then goes to buy some drugs.
When she gets home she discovers the pieces from her jigsaw have been arranged so as to form a trail through the house and ending at a photograph of her daughter. The Visitor is at home and he introduces her to lactation sex (squeezing her nipples to make her lactate, a recurring theme in this film). The son sees the scene while hiding behind the door.
At dinner the mother is much happier than usual and has prepared a nice meal. The son, however, is sullen and throws a bowl of hot soup at her face. The wife though -- instead of being downtrodden like usual -- comes back with a carving knife and throws it at the son's head, who dodges just in time. Everyone is very pleased except the son. However the father becomes exhilarated when the school children start attacking his house with fireworks again, which he video tapes. Meanwhile, the mother and the Visitor continue to eat peacefully.
Next day the son is bullied more. The father is video taping son from his car with the Visitor and his female co-worker. The co-worker gets fed up with the father and tries to leave. The father follows her on foot and sexually assaults her while the Visitor, emotionally neutral, video tapes the scene. The father unintentionally chokes her to death.
He takes her body back home and puts her in the greenhouse. The visitor is still taping at the father's instructions. The father sends the Visitor to get garbage bags from the mother. But when the Visitor asks her for them she takes her clothes off and reveals she is dressed in a garbage bag. She then makes herself lactate while the Visitor watches from underneath an umbrella. The husband is meanwhile drawing on the woman’s body to mark the best places to cut the body so the smaller pieces will fit in the bags. He tapes this for his documentary. Becoming aroused, the father has sex with the dead body. He then notices she is getting wet and is amazed that this is possible for a dead woman. When he brings his hand up it is however covered in feces. He then discovers that his penis is stuck inside her due to Rigor mortis. The mother comes out to help and rushes to the shop to buy lots of oils and vinegar. She empties the bottles into the bath with her husband and the corpse. This does not help, though, so she gives him a shot of heroin which frees him. They are both exhilarated. The Visitor has video taped the whole scene.
Later on they are having fun playing around with the corpse when the son turns up in the front yard with the same children beating him. The parents rush out and kill the bullies. Later the son is lying on the floor in the puddle of maternal milk. He thanks the Visitor for the chaos he brought to their family.
The Visitor leaves the family. Later, finding the prostitute daughter on the street, he hits her in the face with a rock. Beaten and bleeding, she comes back home to the family and finds the father suckling on the mother's breast in the garden. The final shot of the movie is of the daughter suckling on her mother's other breast, symbolising the return of family order. All scars on the mother have disappeared as have those on the daughter, shown seconds before (caused by being hit with the rock), suggesting a symbolically healed family.
[edit] Cast
- Kenichi Endo as Kiyoshi Yamazaki, the father
- Shungiku Uchida as Keiko Yamazaki, the mother
- Fujiko as Miki Yamazaki, the daughter
- Jun Mutô as Takuya Yamazaki, the son
- Kazushi Watanabe as The Visitor
- Shôko Nakahara as Asako Murata
[edit] Film analysis
Despite its perverse scenes and deliberately shocking visual imagery, the film is grounded in conservative ideas and values, particularly gender identity and family roles.
Miike's desire to shock plays a big part of the film's artistic direction, highlighted by the use of deliberately provocative captions preceding scenes which advocate sex and violence with one’s own family members: "Have you ever (had sex) with your dad?" and "Ever beat up your mother?" The audience is called to relate to the children's point of view in these captions, congruent to the theme of juvenile delinquency. In the father's documentary on the hopelessness of the new generation, the youngsters depicted are prostitutes, mother-beaters and bullies. Ironically, the main subjects of the documentary are his own offspring.
The film emphasizes the necessity of a woman in order for harmony to exist in a traditionalist Japanese household. In one of the film's more notorious scenes -- where self-stimulation causes the mother to lactate excessively, flooding the kitchen with milk -- the mother’s femininity is symbolically restored and she becomes fully functional as a wife and a mother.
[edit] External link
- Visitor Q at the Internet Movie Database
- (Japanese) Visitor Q at the Japanese Movie Database
