The Crazy Family

We’ve had a few Sogo (Gakuryu) Ishii films appear over the last few years, Burst City, Electric Dragon 80000v, Crazy Thunder Road, Punk Samurai, now add to that another Third Window’s release; The Crazy Family (1984). I know, I know, I’m late here. The irony was I was meant to see it at the cinema months ago but cometh the day, cometh the stinking cold...

The Kobayashi family are coming home! Their home. A house no less. No more public housing for the Kobayashi family, assuming there are no white ants to harm their home! Salaryman father, Yasukuni (Katsuya Kobayashi), housekeeper mother, Saeko (Mitsuko Baisho) and their two children: Masaski (Yoshiki Arizono) who is desperately studying to get into university and Erika (Yuki Kudo) who could be an actor, a wrestler, an idol!  

Enter the Grandfather (Hitoshi Ueki), who just does not fit in the Kobayashi's slightly undersized house, and does not always behave as he should.

The Crazy Family is peak Ishii. It feels like his best, most rounded work. It carries the same manic energy of many of his films, the same inventive, anarchic spirit, but it’s also controlled and carefully distributed; style & substance coming together in 105-minutes of comedy, drama, absurdity, destruction, lunacy and cinematic madness.

I have to admit to a sense of foreboding toward the film, mainly because films that are manic are hard to maintain and can become trying if they drag on too long. But The Crazy Family is superbly paced, often stylish and the madness is interspersed, finally culminating in a bout of familial lunacy that really hits home because it’s so well set up by the characters and the tone of the film – it can go nowhere else. What felt key to me here was not just the manic nature of the film, the absurdist incidents, the fragments of lunacy but the quiet moments; in this film Ishii feels like he nails balance between energy and allowing the audience to catch their breath, and importantly the slower, more measured aspects are never dull, never just filler but indeed equally as essential as the high energy elements of the film. It’s like Tsukamoto, where he might jump from kinetic visual excess, cutting wildly to soft, slow, thoughtful scenes, and they elevate each other, the manic and the contemplative; here, too is the same.  

Often Ishii slows down and allows images to talk for themselves; the father’s trips to work, face always smashed up to the glass on the packed subway; building up the image of nightmare commute and why he might be slowly losing his mind, thinking his family are ill and need to be saved. Equally, the build-up to the madness is gradual, and not just lunacy for the sake of it, instead grounded in social commentary. The father’s desperate gratitude for having been able to afford a house for his family then horror on finding a white ant, white ants that can harm your house so it must die die die die die! Social mobility, home ownership as an act of pride and status; equally the wife you suspect needs an outlet, so the sudden presence of her father-in-law brings out some of her more hedonistic tendencies, being otherwise trapped at home. The son, must must must must must study study study study, even if it means harming himself to keep awake to do so; and the daughter who wants attention, and must must must must must make her ambition to be a star work (and there are aspects of the younger sister from Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse about her). All the family, as they descend finally into madness, each one has an insanity that takes on a form that matches their own respective situations, even the father, who realises the grandfather needs somewhere to live so... why not create a basement in the middle of the room: provider mentality taken to extremes of lunacy. And then there is the family illness, as they are all ill, and even owning this fine, if small, house cannot fix that even if it should.

Style meeting substance is perhaps best illustrated in the sequence where you feel the father finally snaps, and his journey home, the camera trapping him, tracking him, flowing with him, it's full of energy and again some shades of what Tsukamoto does in his first two Tetsuo films, but the continuity and power of image suggesting his descent into madness is one of those great moments of filmmaking where it again could either go on too long or try too hard, but here Ishii is, as I say, at peak Ishii and just balances it all perfectly. I was left fascinated watching it while also wondering what will come of this, because you know that here you are visually seeing the father unravel and in little more than the stop start editing of this journey. Watch and enjoy.  

Balance too is in the performances - another reason why I was a little trepidatious, Sometimes in manic comedies the performances can become too much as the actors try too hard, but Ishii provides as much of his absurdity with his camera and the performances are all spot on. The sleep deprived son, starting to go sociopathic in his obsession is slow and quiet in his madness, whereas the daughter is standout and showy.  

And of course, it’s easy to forget that almost the whole film takes place in this one house and it never feels it. Like watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window where the camera only once leaves the room, not for a moment does it feel like the house is constraining the filmmakers or the actors, if anything its confines, its peculiarities (the daughter even has her own doorbell on her bedroom door), make the film richer and its closeness, its smallness make you feel the buildup of the madness most of all.  

Watching a family lose their mind has never been so much fun.