LEY LINES is the final instalment in Miike’s loose ‘Kuroshakai’ trilogy of films, the preceding films being SHINJUKU TRIAD SOCIETY (1995) and RAINY DOG (1997). It was written by Ichiro Ryu, who also wrote DOA for Miike the same year, plus CITY OF LOST SOULS (2000) and DOA: FINAL (2002). The film is very similar in feel to CITY OF LOST SOULS, but also recalls GUYS FROM PARADISE (2000), BIRD PEOPLE OF CHINA (1997) and BLUES HARP (1997) strongly.

The story concerns two brothers who travel from a small Japanese town to Tokyo, seeking their fortunes. The three are all first generation Japanese, born to Chinese parents, a familiar theme for Miike, and the main narrative connection between the three films in the ‘trilogy’. In Tokyo they meet a prostitute called Anita and a gay pusher called ‘Barbie’. Barbie introduces them to his boss (played by Sho Aikawa), who enrols them in his drug-pushing business, selling ‘glue’. They become more involved in the business but remain unhappy in Tokyo, still feeling out of place. They try to obtain fake passports, but are reported to the head of the triad that they are working for, a mysterious Chinese called Wan (Naoto Takenaka, a prolific actor who is a Miike regular, but is most familiar to a Western audience for his parts in GONIN (1995, Takashi Ishii) and SHALL WE DANCE? (1996, Masayuki Suo)). Wan yearns for his homeland yet tries to dissuade the gang from leaving Tokyo. Eventually the three arrange to be smuggled to Brazil, along with Anita the prostitute, but need to raise 12 million yen to pay for the trip. How? Anyone who’s seen a few yakuza/triad films will be able to hazard a guess, I’m sure…

As usual for Miike, the film is filled with unusual characters and situations. The relationship between the prostitute and the three main characters in the film is certainly an odd one – they first meet her in a seedy restaurant. She arrives to service a client upstairs whilst they eat. The ensuing violent sex causes dirt to fall from the ceiling onto their meals. When she comes back down they follow her to a deserted building where she tells them her friends are waiting. She locks them in a room and runs off, then they discover she had picked their pockets too. We follow her and meet her violent pimp, who abuses her and forces her to go to a weird client who uses various surgical instruments on her. Wandering the streets looking completely bedraggled, she bumps into one of the guys. He has sex with her as she screams hysterically “men are idiots”. Later, she returns with him to his apartment, where she ends up having sex with both of the other guys before sleeping in a bed with all three.

Wan, the boss of the triad is also a typically bizarre (and unlikely) character. A ruthless criminal, he seeks women who can tell him genuine fables from China, in an effort to remind himself of the childhood he cannot recall. The minor characters in the film are also odd – take Barbie, the African pusher who we first meet assaulting a man in a public toilet, or the fake passport guy who is busy digitally censoring a porno film with the same digital scrawls that Miike himself had employed earlier in the film.

Perhaps the main highlight of the film is the fantastic photography, which is of an even higher standard than is usual for Miike. The film is filled with unusual camera angles, frenetic handheld sequences, slow motion or tinted sequences and strange long takes. There are also several odd point-of-view shots – from the POV of a ceiling, a train and from the inside of a vagina (!)

Thematically, there is a lot of familar material here. Miike's continuing interest in Japanese youths who feel out of place in Japan due to their heritage is very much in evidence ("Are you Japanese?" they are asked frequently), as is his interest in odd relationships amid the sleazy, seedy side of Japan's underworld. Although familiar, it is these deeper concerns that really drive the film, preventing it from becoming just a standard yakuza picture. Miike once again takes the commercially acceptable conventions of the genre and twists them around, using them to explore themes and issues that would otherwise probably not interest his target audience a great deal.

The film isn’t very violent by Miike’s standards but there are a couple of unsettling sequences, most notably the prostitute’s encounter with the strange client. There is a lot of typically black humour, but also an increasingly elegiac feel to the film as it progresses towards a somewhat inevitable conclusion. The ending is very much atypical for Miike, and shows how deftly he can handle the different emotional aspects of cinema. Indeed, anyone unconvinced of Miike’s ability to do anything other than shock with his films could do no better than to watch the three films in the ‘Kuroshakai’ trilogy, which manage to showcase the breadth of his talents as an auteur director better than perhaps any of his other work.

Cast
Samuel Pop Aning
Yukie Itou
Michisuke Kashiwaya
Kazuki Kitamura
Dan Li
Sho Aikawa
Naoto Takenaka
Ren Osugi
Tomoroh Taguchi
Koji Tsukamoto
Hua Rong Weng

Crew
Director – Takashi Miike
Screenplay – Ichiro Ryu
Producer – Tsutomu Tsuchikawa
Music – Koji Endo
DP – Naosuke Imaizumi
Editing – Yasushi Shimamura
Production Design – Akira Ishige
Sound – Yukiya Sato