Screened at The Museum of The Moving Image, 5pm showtime. Movie Theater Snacks: nothing but a nauseous stomach. You’re not going to want to eat for a while after this film.
This documentary is not what I thought it would be. It barely touches on the events that occurred in 1981, when Japanese man Issei Sagawa murdered and ate his classmate Renée Hartvelt. This film isn’t even an interview. Instead, we are watching a painter create images on a canvas. Who that painter is: Issei, his twin brother Jun, or the filmmakers Paravel & Castaing, is up to us to decide.
Caniba is both an exercise in patience and in depravity. It’s extremely slow moving, with Issei speaking a few words, then pausing for an extended number of seconds, before finally finishing his very poetic thought. Whether this is a result of the stroke he suffered a few years ago is never disclosed, but possibly the thoughts of a man who now thinks before he speaks. His words are delivered as cryptic poetry, both fantastical and confessionary, in potentially the most intimate he’s ever been about his feelings.
Accompanying these words are his face and only that. The entire film is a close-up, morphing between crisp and out-of-focus. There is an extended sequence that seems to go on forever, when Issei lays down to sleep and his face is on screen staring directly back at us. I began to doze off, eventually closing my eyes for a moment. When I woke up, his face was still on screen and I still do not have any idea how long I was asleep, if I even fell asleep, or for how long that sequence went on for. It’s an incredibly interesting way to view him, that is unique and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. But the moment this scene ends, you are abruptly woken up by debauchery, as we get to witness one of Issei’s amateur porn videos, one of many he filmed through-out the 90’s, capitalizing on his new-found criminal fame.
This is only the beginning of the nausea.
The other half of this film involves Issei’s twin brother Jun. Jun has dark secrets of his own that he has never shared with anyone, and within the film, we witness him firsthand telling his brother Issei about his secrets after 60 years of keeping silent. I was not prepared to feel physically ill, and I was not prepared to be staring at these images for as long as I was. But just as the filmmakers shot the faces of their subjects, we were forced to gaze at the violence in extreme close-up and for an extended period of time.
Caniba is unconventional in every way. It’s a moving piece that looks at, not a cannibal, but the guilt of a cannibal who has been living with this in his head for nearly 40 years. Then, stepping aside and looking at his brother who deals with his own demons. “Is the pain they feel and express genuine?” is the question you’ll be asking yourself for days.
The film ends with a miracle though, and we get to witness it ourselves: Issei Sagawa feeling happy. How he acquires this happiness though is just another twisted moment we have to voyeuristically endure.
Yagi Film Reviews 