Anyone who gets tired of Miike's over-the-top style would do well to watch the Black Society Trilogy, three movies with a shared theme of transnational alienation in the underground that stick out as some of his more sober and effective films. Ley Lines is the story of three friends, half Chinese, half Japanese, who run away from home to try to survive in Tokyo. Needless to say, their lives in the underground aren't too successful, as through various run-ins with a Shanghaian prostitute, a drug dealer, and a crime lord named Wong, most of them end up dead.
Labeled on the back of the ArtsMagic DVD as being an exploration into racism, that aspect covers only about a third of what is going on here. There are many discussions in the movie, indeed, about race, oftentimes with racial slurs bleeped out (Miike is not one to censor himself, so someone else must have censored him; on the other hand, not all bad words and slurs are censored, so maybe the censorship was purposeful to provide a bit of ambiguity as to what the characters are actually saying. I can't tell). The Black Society Trilogy, however, is about the underground and undercurrents, something that may not seem all that different than Miike's larger oeuvre but which is covered through entirely different concerns. Alienation is the biggest aspect; dangerous self-destruction another. The characters in Ley Lines escape small-town bullying and rivalry to include themselves in something much larger, much more dangerous, and completely out of their ability to handle.
Ley Lines pops up in essays and descriptions of Miike as one of his finer works, and I have to say I agree. At first I wasn't too taken by it because most of it is under-exposed and dark and it took a while to build. However, both of course were the point: I'ven't seen a Miike movie take its time to build like this since Audition, and the cinematography is a sickly saturated primary color scheme that foreshadows Miike's later Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. Big Bang Love, Juvenile A gets compared to Lars Van Trier from time to time, and if that's the case, I'd compare Ley Lines to a Michael Haneke movie: each scene is built off of a particular, isolated pastiche.
--PolarisDiB
Labeled on the back of the ArtsMagic DVD as being an exploration into racism, that aspect covers only about a third of what is going on here. There are many discussions in the movie, indeed, about race, oftentimes with racial slurs bleeped out (Miike is not one to censor himself, so someone else must have censored him; on the other hand, not all bad words and slurs are censored, so maybe the censorship was purposeful to provide a bit of ambiguity as to what the characters are actually saying. I can't tell). The Black Society Trilogy, however, is about the underground and undercurrents, something that may not seem all that different than Miike's larger oeuvre but which is covered through entirely different concerns. Alienation is the biggest aspect; dangerous self-destruction another. The characters in Ley Lines escape small-town bullying and rivalry to include themselves in something much larger, much more dangerous, and completely out of their ability to handle.
Ley Lines pops up in essays and descriptions of Miike as one of his finer works, and I have to say I agree. At first I wasn't too taken by it because most of it is under-exposed and dark and it took a while to build. However, both of course were the point: I'ven't seen a Miike movie take its time to build like this since Audition, and the cinematography is a sickly saturated primary color scheme that foreshadows Miike's later Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. Big Bang Love, Juvenile A gets compared to Lars Van Trier from time to time, and if that's the case, I'd compare Ley Lines to a Michael Haneke movie: each scene is built off of a particular, isolated pastiche.
--PolarisDiB