Evidently,
Japan does not have a “Son of Sam” Law, because if it did, Issei Sagawa
probably would have starved. In a way, that would have been poetic justice.
While studying in Paris at the Sorbonne, Sagawa murdered and partially ate his
fellow student, Renée Hartevelt. In the years since, he has traded on his
infamy through books, crude autobiographical manga, and appearance in hardcore films
as well as documentaries. Noted ethnographic documentarians Véréna Paravel
& Lucien Castaing-Taylor are the latest to prolong Sagawa’s fifteen minutes
of fame with Caniba (trailer here), which opens
tomorrow at the Museum of the Moving Image.
Unfortunately,
Hartevelt was not available to participate in the documentary, because Sagawa killed
her. He was never really punished for it either. France deported him back to
Japan, where he only spent a few years in a mental facility. Since then, his
brother Jun has been his primary care-giver and adult supervision. As you might
expect, it is a weird symbiotic relationship, but it reaches new levels of
awkwardness when Jun finally reveals to his brother the sort of extreme S&M
he both fantasizes about and participates in.
Clearly,
Paravel & Castaing-Taylor envision the film as a sort of Grey Gardens for violent predators, but
their experimental approach perversely drains the film of any lurid interest it
might hold for cult movie patrons. Ironically, their extreme close-ups have a
distancing effect. Most of their shots of Sagawa look like they were composed
with the intent of recreating Bowie’s Hunky
Dory album cover.
Without
question, the most effective sequences show the Sagawa brothers when they were apparently
happy and healthy children. It definitely begs the question: what happened?
Yet, the filmmakers do not investigate in any meaningful way. Instead, they
latch on to Sagawa’s banal bromides that supposedly explain the forbidden appeal
of cannibalism. The truth is, it is pretty thin stuff. Again, Ms. Hartevelt is
not afforded an opportunity to present a dissenting view.
The
#metoo movement is as good as dead if established filmmakers who regularly
present their work at festivals like Venice, Berlin, and Locarno are
uncomfortable taking a firm moral stand against killing and eating women. That
sounds gauchely harsh, but this film is sort of asking for it. It could very
well be problematic in every way possible. Not recommended, Caniba opens tomorrow (10/19) in Queens,
NY at MoMI.
