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Sometime in the late 1930's: writer Edogawa Rampo (Naoto Takenaka) is
becoming more and more detached from reality and sees reality becoming
more and more detached from him as well: The gouvernment bans his writings
for their controversial and sexual nature, when he speaks at a movie
premiere, his audience doesn't even take note of him, and in a movie based
on his books he doesn't see his work reflected at all. Actually he has
grown so detached that he wants to leave everything behind for good ...
when his agent (Teruyuki Kagawa) brings to his notice a newspaper clipping
about a man who has died in a trunk, and it's unclear whether it was an
accident or whether he has been killed by his wife Shizuko (Michiko Hada)
- which mirrors one of Rampo's own stories to the t ... however, the story
in question has not yet been published.
Rampo starts taking an interest in Shizuko, and actually (and
unexpectedly) he helps her come over her loss - but when she really starts
to need him, he breaks up all contact and escapes into his fantasy world,
where his alter ego Kogoro Akechi (Masahiro Motoki) enters the mansion of
Marquis Ogawara (Mikijiro Hira), whose companion Shizuko has become. Thing
is, the Marquis is also a pervert, he likes to occasionally dress up as a
woman and likes to humiliate and whip Shizuko ... to a point where she
arranges it for him to have an accident. Later, she confesses the
murder to Kogoro but successfully calls upon his sympathy and invites him
to climb into a trunk, resembling the one her husband has died in. Rampo,
who is creating this story on paper, does not want his alter ego to climb
into the trunk, but rather surprisingly, Kogoro refuses to obey him any
longer.
In panic, Rampo heads over to Shizuko's place, but learns that just
like her fictional alter ego, she has gone to the Marquis' castle. Rushing
there, Rampo sees his fictional world already crumbling down, but reaches
Shizuko just in time to embrace her and keep her from disappearing, of
course not the real Shizuko but his ideal image of her he has fallen in
love with.
Edogawa Rampo was a real life Japanese horror and mystery writer who
lived from 1894 to 1965. This film however is not a bio-pic of the author
in any traditional sense of the word but rather a depiction of his
creative process and reinterpretation of his work, comparable possibly to
Wim Wenders' Hammett (1982). And just like Hammett, Rampo
the film fails to totally convince as it tries to be too much at once, a
horror and mystery story, a surreal work of art, a re-inerpretation of
works of literature and quite simply a piece of narrative cinema -
and more often than not, all these elements rule each other out ... But,
again just like Hammett, Rampo isn't without its charm, it's
weird, it's macabre, at times it's even slightly perverse, and it's made
with hindsight, plus it's beautifully photographed and directed - it's
just not all it could have been would the directors have decided on a more
homogenous and trimmed down approach ...
A few words to the making of of this film: Originally, Rintaro Mayuzumi
finished the film in 1992, with his version lacking most of the surreal
elements of the story as well as the animated prologue. However, producer
Kazuyoshi Okuyama was less than pleased with the result, and made it his
personal mission to save the film, deliberately adding scenes and
refilming about 40 percent of the movie for a 1994 release, to co-incide
with the author's 100th birthday. Ultimately (and for legal reasons), both
versions of the film were released on the same day, but Mayuzumi's version
quickly disappeared while Okuyama's (which this review is based on)
prevailed (which might have to do with the fact that as producer, Okuyama
was the man wielding more power). It would be interesting to see
Mayuzumi's version in comparison ... one can only hope that it will one
day resurface somewhere.
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find The Mystery of Rampo at adultvideouniverse.com
