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Always the Twain Shall Meet

Photo courtesy of Neo-Eiga.

Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto doubles the pleasure with Gemini

By Kimberly Chun

Evil twins and bad haircuts aside, Gemini isn’t exactly the film one might expect from director Shinya Tsukamoto, best known for Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Tetsuo was an original-from its manic, jagged pacing to the “climactic” scene in which a drill emerges from the hero’s crotch.

Nothing quite as outrageous emerges in Gemini, other than the throwback looks that recall both Yohji Yamamoto’s faux-Victorian ensembles and Hazy Fantazy’s equally faux, new wave, ragamuffin tatters. Instead, Gemini explores polar opposites—elegance and camp, classicism and punk, butoh and melodrama—with surprising results. Smart and sexy, Gemini doubles as both a soap opera and art film, starting with all the broad strokes and hallmarks of a horror film and taking a philosophical turn, becoming a more nuanced, psychological thriller.

Based on the novel Soseiji by mystery scribe Rampo Edogawa, Gemini is set in turn-of-the-century, late Meiji-era Tokyo and revolves around Dr. Yukio Daitokuji (Masahiro Motoki of Shall We Dance?), an upstanding second-generation doctor, decorated war hero and generally solid citizen. His new wife Rin (Ryo) is a beautiful amnesiac with no past, no eyebrows and none of the bourgeois biases of her father-in-law (science-fiction writer Yasutaka Tsutsui) or mother-in-law (Shiho Fujimura), who both have suspicions about their new daughter’s murky history. There are other unsettling wrinkles in the sepia-hued, formal façade of the family: A nauseating aroma drives the family patriarch to distraction. The family lives near a slum and is taunted by the occasional tramp. An eerie feeling that the family is being watched pervades throughout.

A series of mysterious deaths and accidents drive Yukio and Rin apart. The final turn of the screw comes when Yukio is attacked in the garden and finds himself grappling with his mirror image. It’s his identical twin, Sutekichi (also Motoki), who grew up to be a slum-dwelling criminal and killer. He has returned to assume his birth right. After he throws Yukio down a well, Sutekichi takes over his brother’s life in every way, including his marital duties. The twists don’t stop there. The plot thickens, curdles and contorts into a Mobius strip of mistaken and recovered identity.

It takes an avant-garde filmmaker such as Tsukamoto to breathe new life into the hackneyed story of the doppelganger. Evoking both David Lynch and William Gibson in his willingness to play with genre and revel in punk rage, the film opens with the luminous cinematography and formal compositions of a proper Japanese household. The shadows grow as bodies are found and mythical, horrific figures appear, and when the camera turns to the slum, the sets become more flimsy and self-consciously theatrical; butoh dancers make up a mob scene, and the costumes become more symbolic, all Mohawks and tangled dreads, British, “New Depression,” thread-bare duds and boldly colored Japanese folk kimonos. Moments in which the household fragments and Yukio’s psyche shatters are triggered with noisy shards of opera and African/folk choral sounds.

Is there a primitive, deadly twin hiding within each of us, observing and waiting to emerge? No doubt, and the film offers that the struggle between the self and the “other,” the light and the dark, is essential to being a complete human. Both beautiful to watch and thought-provoking, Gemini is emotionally absorbing and intellectually ambitious. Thankfully, Tsukamoto couldn’t make a Family Trap if he tried.