Village Voice, NYC, July 27th, 2004 12:10 PM
"I really wanted purity and innocence," Takashi Miike says of Gozu's virginal protagonist, whose id leaks might be responsible for the film's slurping cow god, gender switching, and (for the second time in Miike's career) hyper-lactating woman...... A straight-to-video title that eventually screened at Cannes, Gozu starts off on yakuza turf: A rookie assigned to gun down his gone-apeshit elder "brother" flubs the assignment, then kills him in a car accident anyway, only to lose the body. His attempts at retrieval plunge him (and the viewer) further into places that Miike expert Tom Mes has dubbed "almost Lynchian realms of post-logic."
... For instance, why has breast milk seeped into two Miike flicks? "The simple reason? Sato saw it previously in Visitor Q and liked it." And the faraway sound—"pasu, pasu, pasu"—that lingers as Minami is about to "lose it"? "As a child, a boy can still be taken inside the women's section of the public baths.
...See the Gozu trailer or visit the website.
