Katsuhito Ishii is – and this is difficult to dispute – the Japanese master of absurd comical cinema. While his films are, by virtue of their distinctive eccentricity, not for everyone, various of his films have captured their righteous place within the collective consciousness – e.g. The Taste of Tea (2004), Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005). Another one of his films that has earned the right to be counted among the best is Party 7, a rough gem re-affirming the reality of the phallus, the object-goal of our desire.   

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Katsuhito Ishii opens his narrative with a beginning that resembles the opening line of a joke. A hotel receptionist (Kanji Tsuda) and his bellman (Yoshiyuki Morishita) are in a heated discussion concerning the veracity of the former’s story of the witnessing shit falling out of the sky until a costumer called Miki (Masatoshi Nagase) enters the premises to check in.

Okita (Tadanobu Asano), after leaving prison, hastes himself to hospital where his father, Ryujiro Okita, is dying. Apologising for having been arrested again for peeping, his father confides in him and tells him of a room he built in his hotel for the purpose of unlimited peeping.

Together with Captain Banana (Yoshio Harada), Okita starts utilizing this room and witnesses Miki hiding his heavy bag of luggage and welcoming Kana (Akemi Kobayashi) into his room. And, much to Miki’s irritation, she is not the only one who is able to find out where he trying to lay low: Kana’s boyfriend Todohira (Yoshinori Okada) shows up, then Sonoda (Keisuke Horibe) and, finally, Wakagashita (Tatsuya Gasyuin).

Ishii knows how to open a narrative. While many directors seek to give the spectator a firm basis within their narrative with a clear expositional opening, Ishii utilizes his opening quarter evocatively sketch a simple narrative frame – Miki goes in hiding because he stole money – and introduce the main orienting signifiers of his narrative: absurdity and violence.

The brief yet visually arresting manner by which Ishii introduces the simple backbone of his narrative and the subsequent juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated narrative spaces – the concatenation of scenes without a clear connection – has a clear aim. Ishii, purposefully, sabotages the spectator’s pacifying sense of knowing what will follow to exploit his anticipatory lack to be able to evoke tension with ease and surprise him at every narrative corner with what he allows the marriage of these two signifiers to produce.

Ishii’s creative marriage gives birth to a compelling mix of absurd comedy, thrilling suspense, brutal flashes of action, and touching romantic and bro-mantic drama. However, like all true witty films, Ishii utilizes this energetic eclectic blend to expose the phallus for what it is – deflated when present and a fantasized signal of desirability when absent from the visual field.

The first indication of the radical absence of the imaginary phallus and the signifying emptiness of the symbolic phallus is given by Ishii when he light-heartedly punctures the effect the Other – the repository of rules, conventions, ideals the subject relies on within his social interactions – has on subjective expression and the field of the signified.

The variety of conversational absurdities highlight that the particularized conventions of speech determine which signified the listener attributes to the signifiers of the speaker. The speech-related absurdities affirm that the subject’s speech plays, beyond his control, on multiple staves of the score of language and that what guides his interpretation of the signifiers uttered by the other is his social context, the particularized markers that he employs within conversations to produce and receive meaning. To put it differently, Ishii shows that the particularization of the Other by the subject gives rise to the structural misunderstanding that supports speech-interactions. We seek to integrate ourselves fluidly within the signified demarcated by the shared littering of signifiers – creating fleeting moments of understanding, establishing imaginary connections, yet we fail to create relational harmony because of the phallic emptiness that marks the Other.        

Other moments of verbal absurdity playfully subvert the way social conventions organize what (signified) can be expressed and what cannot in certain social situations, what should be done and what shouldn’t. We, in our interactions with others, regulate our speech in accordance with the societal Other (i.e. rules, ideals, …) and the transgression of its interactional prescriptions punctures the de-subjectifying semblance and enables the field of subjectivity to comically rears its head (Psycho-note 1). This point is evocatively corroborated by the many surges of visual absurdity – the sudden infraction of visual elements that perforate the harmonious fiction of social normality and lays bare the absurdity of subjectivity.

It is a logical consequence of Ishii’s focus on the absurdity caused by the lack in the Other that he eventually touches upon the fact that the sexual relationship cannot be written. The conflict between Miki and Kana is, in this sense, not simply caused by his refusal to return the money he borrowed from her, but also animated by his struggle to accept that he, within the space of Kana’s desire, is castrated – she exposes him as a deflated phallus (Narra-note 1). The subsequent appearance of Kana’s boyfriend can, in this sense, only be considered as phallic pun – a ‘phallic’ confrontation, a mix of verbal flaunting and puncturing, between two lacking males. The ultimate pun of Party 7 is the staging of the truth that every one is castrated and that having the phallus (e.g. money, a girl) is but a fata morgana invested in to sustain one’s sense of masculinity.

The space where the voyeurism of Okita, whether a sign of a perverse structure or a derailed neurotic compulsion is of no import, is given the free reign cannot truly fulfill its promise. Okita does not encounter what he wishes to see but is, as absent presence, left enjoying the anticipation of a sexual scene that might or might not materialize itself.

Yet, Okita does encounter the ‘phallus’ within this space – in the shape of Captain Banana, the man who is sitting besides him. He embodies, beyond deemed strange in accordance with the common aesthetical appreciation of the male member, the promise that the sexual relationship can be written. His speech – his reading of Kana’s female logic and Okita’s unconscious – arouses the idea that he, as phallic object, could resolve the unbridgeable distance between the sexes. Yet, as a veritable phallus, he can only materialize himself in the societal field as deflated and dismissed – the promise is not and cannot be kept.       

What makes the composition of Party 7 so pleasant is the way Katsuhito Ishii breathes life into the emotional flow – the flow of suspense and absurd deadpan comedy – of Party 7 by visually attacking the spectator with stylistic decorations – e.g. sudden instances of fast cutting, swift energetic dynamic moments, slow-motion shots, restrained, jump-cuts, zoom-in shots.   

Ishii, moreover, succeeds in interweaving many visually interesting shot-composition within his composition – a result of his thoughtful approach to both geometry and lightning. The animated sequence that introduces the main characters to the spectator is a pure visual feast.

At the level of music, moments of dry pan comedy are either supported by silence or unintrusive light-hearted music and more dramatic music is employed to amplify the tension that arises from the imagery as such and various surges of energetic composing. Yet, there are moments within Party 7 that Ishii utilizes music to deflate the tensive mood and smoothen the path towards a light-hearted sequence.       

Party 7 delivers a highly energetic re-affirmation of the truth of the phallus – its radical absence. While many other comedies touch upon this fact, Ishii elevates its delivery – its staging – with many moments of refined interactional absurdity and a finale that, in an inimitable fashion, exposes lack and castration. Highly recommended.

Notes

Psycho-note 1: As Ishii light-heartedly shows with his narrative, we can puncture the societal semblance both by refusing to abide by the unwritten rules of the societal field or abiding by them to rigidly.

Narra-note 1: Miki affirms his struggle when he defensively seeks to frame Kana’s fiancé as an impotent shrivelled old guy.