While Odagiri Jo was playing with the idea of creating a police drama from the perspective of a dog. Yet, only after feeling the need to react against/deconstruct the image of the auteur the creation of They Say Nothing Stays the Same (2019) gave rise to, the effects of the covid situation and his own period of suffering, he decided to use his idea to create something so absurd that people could fleetingly escape reality.
After two TV-series (2021, 2022), Gosh!! finally makes the jump to the silver screen. Odagiri, however, made sure that the film is accessible for people without prior knowledge – and especially for international audiences. Yet, at the same time, the film invites spectators to seek out the series, to enjoy more vulgar absurdities.
Gosh!! commences in a fancy club, a grand cabaret. A troupe of people are discussing the inexplicable decision of their boss (-) to sell his beloved German Sheppard to acquire a trumpet. A little while later, the boss shows up, yet before the situation can escalate, he is shot dead. A strange red door in the venue opens and an equally strange face piques at the fresh body.
The narrative, then, suddenly zooms in on Ippei Aoba (Sosuke Ikematsu), a police dog handler in the forensics division of Hazama prefectural police, and his dog Oliver, the son of the legendary police dog Rudolph von Bauheim. During an interview for the local tv-station about him and his dog, a thought crosses his mind, that for him his dog is just a foul-mouthed ill-tempered old man (Odagiri Jo) in a dog suit.
Odagiri opens Gosh!! in a manner that cannot but confuse the spectator unfamiliar with the series; we are, in a certain sense, thrusted into a context for which we are ill-prepared and confronted with a series of characters we know little about (General-note 1). While some spectators might consider this a negative, we feel that Odagiri plays with such initial vagueness to force such spectator to engage more deeply with the enunciated signifiers to find his bearings.
Odagiri, however, short-circuits the spectator’s initial attempt to orient himself by shifting narrative spaces – from the strange events at the club to the mundane space where Ippei Aoba is getting interviewed. This shift, luckily, signals out Aoba as the character that anchors the narrative, the character around which the narrative is structured and spun, and confronts the spectator with the repetition of the signifier dog.
The opening sequence of Gosh!! offers the spectator, in fact, an effective and evocative play with the metonymic dimension of the signifier. To put it differently, Odagiri entices the spectator with a single signifier that, by repeating, turns to be the thread that leads him to revelation of the narrative set-up – the signifier functions, in a certain sense, as a dangling carrot.
Of course, as the narrative develops, other associative paths appear (i.e. the repeated appearance of Super Volunteer Konishi (Koichi Sato) and other characters, repetition of different signifiers). Yet, these paths are but puzzle-pieces – little bits of meaning – that do not only reveal something about the narrative set-up, but also enticingly emphasize what cannot yet be grasped. It is around the fifteen-minute mark that Odagiri delivers its first twist: Urushiwara (Kumiko Aso) explains her foul mood by referring to her dream in which Miura beat her at sumo in an underground cabaret. This twist – the introduction of a mysterious dream-like element – puts certain things into perspective and allows the spectator to wonder: Whose dream inaugurated Odagiri’s film? What binds all the characters to this cabaret space? And is this dream-space but a mere figment of the subject’s unconscious or a sign of the existence of multiple dimensions?
Yet, it is only with the appearance of Yayoi Hagoromo (Eri Fukatsu) on the stage that Odagiri gives his narrative an orienting structure – a case to solve for Ippei, Oliver and Hagoromo. This is, moreover, made explicit by the introduction of a title card named Chapter 1: Duty Calls for Ippei, Oliver and Yayoi Hagoromo around the twentieth minute. Yet, the very introduction of chapter-like structure prepares the spectator for unexpected narrative turns, inexplicable intermezzo-like moments and surprising shifts in narrative orientation, thus obfuscating the actual destination of Odagiri’s absurd mystery-comedy.
Yet, while Odagiri is able to show off his skill at playing with the signifier – elegantly exploiting the dimension of association for comical purposes – and creating an interesting narrative structure – surprisingly circular, he does not fully succeed in giving his absurd comedy the punch-like ending it deserves. Gosh!! is, in this sense, a film more about the trip, than the destination. However, a joke without a strong pun does run the risk of leaving its audiences somewhat disappointed.
The main dynamic Odagiri employs at the level of the comic concerns the playful shift between Oliver as ‘cute’ dog and as ‘horny’ man dressed in a dog suit. Many moments of light-heartedness emanate from the clash between those who see Oliver as a mere dog and Ippei (and the spectator) who deals with him in the shape of a sexually-obsessed dog-suited man who talks. As furry human object, Oliver echoes the absence of repression to frame the intrusive nature of animalistic sexual urges on those who are inscribed to the symbolic law of decency. Or, to put it differently, Oliver exposes the excessive nature of libidinal urges that drives the human animal but the societal forces us to supress and repress.
In moments where Oliver is absent, Odagiri relies on a well-patterned combination of slap-stick-moments, conversational light-heartedness, comical exploitation of conversational awkwardness and nonsensicality (e.g. the intrusion of Ippei talking to his dog on the mundane conversational fabric), ‘pleasant’ vulgarities (e.g. Oliver’s sexual urges), and absurdities (e.g. a space full of Takoyaki, the reference to Freddie Mercury). It is, as a matter of fact, evident from the comical fabric that Odagiri seeks to leverage the comical power of the surprise, of fleetingly surging a moment of nonsense into the fabric of sense – and surprise is absent from the finale.
Odagiri keeps the pace of his composition high with moments of fast cutting and a rather speedy drifting kind of dynamism. The director never leaves the spectator much room for taking a breath, ever at the ready to disrupt his more subdued moments with expressively framed narrative digressions – digressions that introduce sudden shifts in pace, interweave still-photography, and stage fleeting flashbacks.
The director also litters his composition with visual decorations to smoothen the visual flow (e.g. a variety of playful shot transitions like evocative cross dissolves) and elegantly employs split-screen effects to deliver visually pleasing manga-like compositions. He, moreover, proves his capability to exploit the cut for comical intent – to interweave pun-like moments within his composition.
Gosh!! offers a healthy dose of comical absurdity, a dose that the contemporary subject very regularly needs. Yet, while it scratches that itch perfectly- comically confronting us with our libidinal nature and its excess, Odagiri Jo does not succeed to end his comical journey with an effective pun-like destination. While the narrative circle closes, the key that closes the narrative is surprisingly mundane.
Notes
General-note 1: Spectators who have seen the series beforehand might experience the way Odagiri inaugurates his narrative differently.