We now
reach that moment that happens at every MIFF where we get the chance to view
the latest film from prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. Miike’s films have been a regular inclusion at
MIFF for as long as I can remember with many times the director having two
films screening at the festival. While
it was a bit of a surprise that “Shield Of Straw” did not make it into this
year’s MIFF (I am guessing it will now be on next year’s roster), Miike’s
previous film “Lesson Of The Evil” was always a sure thing.
At a
local Japanese high school, a meeting is taking place amongst all of the
teachers of the faculty in an attempt to curb cheating during the exam
period. The problem they are having is
the use of mobile phones during exams and they are trying to come up with a
successful and legal way to stop the cheating.
The person who seems to be most in charge and concerned about the
student’s wellbeing is Mr. Hasumi.
Hasumi is relatively new to the school but is everything you look for in
a teacher. He is kind and considerate,
unassuming and thoughtful, and he is very good at his job. He is a favourite amongst the staff and
particularly the students, who seem to trust him more than they do the other
teachers of the school, mainly due to the fact that he doesn’t talk down to
them and treats them like friends rather than students. To say that he has a great rapport with the
students is an understatement. However
all is not right with Mr. Hasumi because behind his visage of kindness and
normality, the man hides a horrible and shocking secret – Hasumi is secretly a
homicidal maniac and anyone who upsets him or gets in his way has a habit of
living a much shorter life than expected.
Until now though, Hasumi has been able to keep his secret just that, but
after another teacher starts snooping into some of the strange occurrences that
happened at the previous school Hasumi taught at, it forces Hasumi to bring his
alter ego out from the shadows in an attempt to silence his critics forever.
The way
that “Lesson Of The Evil” was marketed, I thought I was going to be seeing a
different film than I ended up seeing. I
assumed that the film was going to be about a good teacher who, due to the
political correctness of the times, finds it hard to do his job properly. He continues to get more and more frustrated
when bullying becomes a part of his school and after not being able to properly
punish these kids who are destroying the thrill of learning for everyone else,
he eventually snaps and decides to dish out a brand of punishment that these
kids understand and that is a violent one.
It turned out that “Lesson Of The Evil” was nothing like that because
Mr. Hasumi turned out to just to be your regular homicidal maniac who gets a thrill
out of killing people. The film I
thought I was seeing was full of subtext and social commentary and looked at
how hard it is to teach in today’s world and I thought it was going to be
something really interesting, when in reality “Lesson Of The Evil” has no depth
to it at all. What you see is what you
get, and it turns out to be a very shallow exercise in bloody violence. That said, what is on screen is actually
quite entertaining, it is just a shame that it means nothing.
Something
that I really did not like about the film is that it really put teachers and
schools in such a bad light. From this
film, you would assume that all any teacher wants to do is to bed any of their
students they can, and that none of them have the ability to say “no” if a
student has a crush on them. So many of
the teachers in this film are having sexual affairs with their students, that
it is not funny. While I have no doubt
that this does happen from time to time in the real world, this film makes it
come across as commonplace, to the point that these scenes are presented so
nonchalantly as if they are the norm.
The film
really has two halves with the first half surprisingly being the more
interesting which is where we see Hasumi at his best; where he is the brilliant
teacher that everyone looks up to and loves.
During the meeting it is his suggestion in a bid to stop the cheating
that the school uses signal jammers as well as searching students when entering
the room for mobile phones. When he is
shot down over his suggestion because these things are illegal and would take
away from the student’s rights, he doesn’t become undeterred by it, instead he
sets up listening devices in a number of the rooms (and the signal jammers) in
secret where he starts to learn of the worst aspects of the school like the
bullying and the affairs between a number of teachers with their students. At this point in the film we assume that Mr.
Hasumi is going to turn these people in, because all we have seen from this man
is kindness and a focus on the student’s wellbeing and studies, and that he
will clean up the school for good but it is actually quite shocking to see this
man do the opposite. Mr. Hasumi uses
this information as blackmail material and eventually as grounds to kill when
he wants to. The second half of the film
is when Mr. Hasumi totally loses control and commits one of the most brutal
massacres ever seen before in a film.
While this part of the film is shocking in its content, watching school
kids being constantly eviscerated by a shotgun can become hard to take after a
while, it lacks the complexities of the opening half and the film ends up
becoming much less interesting.
The
performance from Hideaki Ito as Hasumi actually mirrors the film’s two halves
because I thought that he was fantastic in the opening half playing this
thoughtful and caring teacher, where his performance became a total over the
top cliché when Hasumi becomes the psycho he does. He becomes so broad as a performer which is a
shame because he gives Hasumi incredible depth early on in the film where he is
so charismatic too. One part of the
second half that I did love was when he was totally gone, from a mental point
of view, and he was talking to his gun, which in his eyes was fused to his
hand, in some sick Cronenberg-like way.
In fact this was the only part of the second half that didn’t come
across as generic. There are so many
small and bit characters in the film, that it is only Ito’s performance that
commands attention although I will say that I loved to seeing Shota Sometani
and Fumi Nikaido on screen together even though it was only brief (they were
the stars of Sion Sono’s “Himizu”) and I also thought that Mitsuru Fukikoshi
(also from “Himizu”) was hilarious as the teacher who starts the investigation
into Hasumi.
“Lesson
Of The Evil” is always going to be remembered for the school-set massacre that
happens at the end of the film and for good reason because it is extremely
bloody with Takashi Miike leaving nothing to the imagination. Time after time we are witness to kids being
shot at close range and watching their soon-to-be lifeless bodies recoil in
agony. To give you an idea just how much
blood is shed in this finale, Hasumi actually wears a plastic raincoat the
whole time that is covered in the blood from his dirty work. However the massacre goes on for far too long
that eventually the audience becomes desensitized to the violence on screen
(which should never be possible when it comes to kids being gunned down in cold
blood) to the point that it becomes so repetitive that we ultimately become
bored. In fact, the length of Takashi
Miike’s films of late has become something of a problem as the majority of them
are all over two hours, which for the most part is far too long. “Lesson Of The Evil” falls into this
category, and if Miike was able to trim back about twenty minutes from the
film, I am sure it would’ve been beneficial to it.
Overall,
“Lesson Of The Evil” is a typical Miike film in the fact that it is extremely
well made, but the film itself is less than the sum of its parts. It is a film of two halves with the first
half being much more interesting than the second bloodier half. Sensitive viewers need to be wary of “Lesson
Of The Evil” because the scenes of the children being unceremoniously massacred
are incredibly bloody and confronting and I am sure that there are many people
who would find them very hard to watch.
At the end of the day though, Miike’s “Lesson Of The Evil” is a
competent film, an entertaining film but ultimately it is a hollow film which
is a little damning. It also appears
that the film will have a sequel sometime because the film ends with the words
“to be continued…….”.
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