Kirei (aka: Terror of Beauty) — movie review
It’s no secret there are more ugly people on this planet than ever before. It’s simple mathematics really. The population’s ever increasing, and only roughly 3 in 10 babies will grow up to be attractive adults. Sure, proportionally there should be roughly the same percentage of ugly people as in days of yore, but toss the modern lifestyle of convenience into the mix (fast food, video on demand, drive through Star Bucks) and those numbers dwindle even further. But writer/director Katsuya Matsumura sees a different reason for the erosion of beauty. We’ve stopped worshipping Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty, and instead have turned toward physical enhancements via chemistry and technology. Being the grudge holding bitch she is, Aphrodite has in turn turned her back on the legions of ugly, letting them wallow in their hoplessness and insecurity. This then, is the driving force behind the beautification industry, which in turn is the target of his latest film.
Kirei (Beautiful) sees Yoko Noguchi (Yukiko Okamoto, Rampo Jigoku), a successful and attractive young plastic surgeon, whose burgeoning business begets a constant flow of customers. Yoko takes pride in both her work, and the power she holds over people, remarking “Since insurance doesn’t cover cosmetic surgery, I can charge whatever I want.” You see, Yoko has never been one of the huddled homely masses. When a mysterious young woman, ugly to the point of near disfigurement, asks Yoko to “make her beautiful” through some rather unconventional procedures, and offering an incredible sum of money, Yoko’s greed takes over. As luck would have it, Yoko’s patient is not as she initially seems. The beautiful Yoko’s in for quite an ugly surprise.
Being V-Cinema’s nihilist extrordinairre, one might expect quite Matsumura’s plastic surgery horror film to evoke at least some sense of hopelessness, pity, revulsion, or dismay, but nothing ever comes. You would think Matsumura would have a field day pointing out the many things wrong with the plastic surgery industry, and the people who opt for surgery as a first resort, but Kirei barely touches on these. Sure, Matsumura’s films are something of a dubious quality (he’s never made something worthy of more than a marginal thumbs up), but at least his previous efforts were passionate about pointing out the ugliness in man. Kirei is just disappointing.
What passes for character development in Kirei is mainly just a series of drawn out repetitions of character actions and posings, as if Matsumura and co writer Rusher Ikeda came up with enough material for a thirty minute film, and decided to loop the events three times. For example, the way we get to know Yoko is by witnessing her performing multiple surgeries and getting naked. In fact, she gets naked a lot. If Matsumura made an attempt to actually frame his shots, anything at all to make these scenes look any better than the average home made celebrity sex tape, it might provide at least some raw titilation. As it is, it’s quite the boring waste of DV tape. There are a couple sequences intended to convey Yoko’s psychological situation, depicting her looking pensive at her desk thumbing her massive super hero shirt collar, and the occasional sequence with her spouting some dialog regarding the nature of beauty, but really that’s about it. Her character is about as thin as her “respectable nose.”
What the film lacks in story is definitely – well, make that partially made up for by the over the top special effects. If you’ve seen Katsuya Matsumura’s All Night Long films, you know already that he has an appetite for the grotesque. The surgeries themselves, eyelid double-fold procedures, liposuctions, and nose jobs are great in that oh so fake, yet oh so gross kind of way. And, while I won’t go into particulars, suffice it to say the end exhibits just about every plastic surgery disaster one could imagine.
Cool effects aside, Kirei really isn’t worth the time and effort needed to make it through the film. If you’re a Matsumura absolutist, a fan of plastic surgery disasters, or just some sad and lonely guy looking to see more than your fair share of Yukiko Okamoto, by all means check it out. For the rest of you, either have your remote control handy, or skip the film altogether.
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