Noisy Requiem

A movie for no one.

Okay, I’m officially over my healing era. I haven’t wanted to watch anything cool, measured, or sleepy. Summer is coming to an end, and with that I am back, baby. I am back to watching all that is upsetting, taboo, and grotesque. If there existed a way to measure my well-being, then watching freaky ass movies would be an indication that I’m thriving.

The other night I watched Noisy Requiem, an erotic nightmare by Japanese arthouse king Yoshihiko Matsui. Noisy Requiem is just that, less of a narrative feature than a collection of loud, disturbing, and dissociated images. I think Deleuze had something to say about these, mental images, as he recalled when discussing Hitchcock as the forefather of cinematic intellect in Cinema I. I’m not going to pretend I understand film theory any more than that though, and will just say that Matsui is a master of creating unease through his symbols. Noisy Requiem left an impression.

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There’s really only one plot element, which involves a serial killer floating through the slums of Osaka to collect body parts to give his lover, a female mannequin, some, uh, dimension. It’s his erotic obsession. He’s a horny, criminal Frankenstein. Matsui presents us with his deranged, feral smiles and laughs—all in this very stark, high contrast black and white, as if to remind us that we are meant to see it all as extreme.

There are a few other characters we follow too, all who live as outcasts in this major metropolis. There’s a street accordionist with an intellectual handicap. A lonely, little person and her high-strung brother. And then a bunch of other beautiful, lonely wanderers, traversing through trash, decay, and ignorance. The movie never fully gets any place and only registers because of how extreme its vision of a dilapidated society is.

In a sense, it reminded me of Kurosawa’s bleak cinematic failure (it’s so, so good), Dodes’ka-den. This film also offers a series of seemingly disconnected frames about the desperate people living in the slums of a major city. It’s a relentless and cruel movie, but hypnotic in its unabashed depictions of urban poverty. The film, Kurosawa’s first color film, flopped, and Kurosawa attempted suicide not too long after. Perhaps people were looking for a throughline in a movie designed to only be horrific.

Even though both movies are directed as detached and documentary-like, there’s an unusual empathy that seeps through. It’s in the atmosphere. Noisy Requiem reminds of Lynch—Elephant Man and Eraserhead. There’s no one who provokes quite like Lynch, but at the same time his images have a way of making you sensitive to any sort of idea of isolation and outsiderness. I think of the cruelty of one particular scene in Wild at Heart. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern stumble upon a car wreck, and watch a fatally injured Sherilyn Fenn stumble around, unaware that these are her last moments. It doesn’t serve a narrative, but it’s evocative and moody and etches itself in your brain. I guess there are few things scarier than processing how one would face such a circumstance, how any of us try to make sense of nature’s inexplicable injustices.

In Noisy Requiem I will remember it all. The screams. The parts of the mannequin, human and non-human. The exaggerated laughs of bus passengers who look on at the little person’s clumsiness. The dog-like, frothy spit that accumulates at the sides of the killer’s mouth. And if I’ll remember all of this, that must mean the movie fucked me up good.