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Katakuri-ke no Kofuku
The Happiness of the Katakuris
Japan 2001
produced by Hirotsugu Yoshida for Shochiku
directed by Takashi Miike
starring Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, Naomi Nishida, Kiyoshiro Imawano, Tetsuro Tanba, Naoto Takenaka, Tamaki Miyazaki, Takashi Matsuzaki, Chihiro Asakawa, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Tokitoshi Shiota, Yoshiki Arizono, Masahiro Asakawa, Kenichi Endo, Moeko Ezawa, Mutsumi Fujita, Akiko Hatakeyama, Yumeki Kanazawa, Shoken Kunimoto, Maro, Aya Meguro, Yuka Nakatani, Miho Sawada
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi, music by Koji Endo, Koji Makaino, visual effects by Misako Saka, choreography by Ryohei Kondo
review by Mike Haberfelner
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All Masao Katakuri (Kenji Sawada) ever wanted was to run a guest house
with his whole family - his wife Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka), his father
(Tetsuro Tanba), his black-sheep-of-the-family son Masayuki (Shinji
Takeda), his daughter Shizue (Naomi Nishida), a hopeless romantic with a
poor taste in men, and Shizue's daughter Yurie (Tamaki Miyazaki) -, so
when he gets an old farmhouse for a steal in an area that's soon to be
connected by a main road, he couldn't be happier ... and circumstances
make it that the whole family moves in with him to help out. But the
problem is, the main road doesn't come, and neither do the guests. The
guest house actually stays without guests for months, and the tension
between the family members rises to almost breaking point ... when finally
a guest (Tokitoshi Shiota) arrives - to kill himself in the very first
night in his room. This shocks the Katakuris, but they decide to instead
of calling the police to just bury the body in the nearby woods to not get
any bad publicity ... More guests arrive soon anyways, but for one
reason or another, neither survive their first nights - and the woods
around the guest house find themselves riddled with more and more graves.
And yet, despite all these mishaps and more - like a hostage situation, a
volcano outbreak, and Shizue's heart being broken by a guest (Kiyoshiro
Imawano) who claims to be from the US Air Force and of British royal blood
- Masao pulls through everything and sees to it that the family pulls with
him ... Above everything else, The Happiness of the
Katakuris is stark raving mad: It's a weird genre mix between dark
comedy, musical (with some intentionally clumsily choreographed
song-and-dance routines), horror, thriller and whatnot. True, one might
say that the film isn't exactly well-structured, and it's episodic to
boot, both of which is absolutely right - but also missing the point, as
rather than being a traditionally narrative movie, the film is made up of
set-pieces that just happen to have a common theme, and mostly these leave
you wonder what will happen next rather than where the story will take its
characters. Now this approach is of course risky business, and one has
seen it failing more often than succeeding, but The Happiness of the
Katakuris boasts this sort of irreverent, dark, campy and yet subtle
humour that make everything just one big pile of fun, and for a change
Takashi Miike proves that he's a master in not overdoing it (apart from
the schmaltzy ending perhaps) while still getting the most out of the
story. Definitely one of the director's very best films, and definitely
a must-see for friends of dark and almost absurd humour.
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