Cure: Erasure

On the other hand, it is possible to regard Mamiya’s project as utopian, rather than merely negative, and to see Mamiya the way he presumably sees himself: as a savior—though if so, the least that could be said is that he has a peculiar way of saving people. If Cure’s portrayal of Takabe owes something to American police thrillers, Mamiya’s hypnotic powers move the film into the realm of the fantastic. Cure establishes what would later become familiar hallmarks of J-horror, as the cycle of Japanese horror films around the turn of the millennium came to be known: the link between media and the supernatural, here represented by an enigmatic silent film that appears to predict the killings (a cursed videotape plays a comparable, though expanded, role in Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Ring, as does dial-up internet in Kurosawa’s own Pulse, from 2001), and the evocation of a mood of creeping dread—most effectively shown in Cure in the slow-burning set pieces in which Mamiya wields his power of suggestion over his delegate assassins.

At the end of the film, alone at his table in a restaurant, Takabe appears to have gotten his reward. Contented, in his element, he makes small, perfect moves. He even finishes his dinner (on an earlier visit to the same restaurant, he left his plate almost untouched). The emptiness that was inside him no longer torments him; it has moved outside. In one of those masterstrokes with which a great director suddenly turns a cinematic world inside out, Kurosawa cuts to a close-up of Takabe in profile, from the opposite side of the table. A rack focus shifts our attention to the incongruities contained within the listless space of the restaurant: a teenage girl laughing with her friends at a table, the supervisor putting her hand on the shoulder of Takabe’s server as if she owned her—the main categories of social activity, leisure and work, laid out and exposed, with no principle of coherence to bind them.

The film has already hinted at the hollowness of social cohesion. Just as he goes twice to the restaurant, Takabe makes two visits to a dry-cleaning establishment. This small, windowed box is a microcosm of the Japan of Cure. On his first visit, Takabe finds himself standing next to another customer, dressed like a typical salaryman, who—while the clerk has gone into the back of the shop for his order, and oblivious of Takabe’s presence—mutters to himself in a rage, taking imaginary private vengeance for some slight endured at work. As soon as the clerk returns, the man resumes the innocuous persona of an ordinary customer. Takabe, in turn, having remained frozen throughout the man’s tirade, now turns to look at him with an expression that betrays no interest. On his second visit, another disruption: Takabe has lost his ticket, and the clerk, unable to find his garment, offers vaguely condescending suggestions (maybe he took it to a different shop; maybe he gave it to his wife). All it takes is the occurrence of an exception (the lost ticket) for communication to reach an unbridgeable impasse.

Mamiya carries the possibility of this communal breakdown within him and exposes it in others. He exploits what Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of the emergence of fascism in Germany after World War I, called the “negative solidarity . . . [of a] mass of generally dissatisfied and desperate men.” Not explicitly a political film, Cure analyzes its apolitical landscape with precision. Kurosawa’s significant choice to open the film in Fumie’s psychiatrist’s office predisposes the viewer to see the world of Cure as a limitless psychiatric clinic. Locked within separate cells, the characters concern themselves with private obsessions. Even when they share the same space, they often remain isolated: in a magnificent shot in the Takabes’ apartment, Fumie hurries across the out-of-focus background to switch on the clothes dryer and return to her room, ignoring her husband’s presence in the foreground, where, slumped to one side in his chair, he registers awareness of her movement without turning to face her.

These spaces deny an exterior world. Any mental image we could reconstruct of Tokyo from the fragmented narrative might resemble the collection of Polaroids that Takabe lays out on a table before Mamiya. The cell to which Mamiya is transferred is impossibly vast, with its communal-sized lavatory opening from a sprawling main room (in a city as crowded as Tokyo, why would the police hold a suspect in such a big cell?). “I don’t know where ‘here’ is,” says Mamiya to Takabe. In the series of images that make up any film, “here” has no fixed referent but changes from cut to cut; “I don’t know where ‘here’ is” could be said by any film viewer who becomes estranged from the narrative logic that commands a given chain of images. The chains of Cure are, furthermore, subject to slippage. In a scene that may take place inside Takabe’s imagination, he and his wife sit aboard a bus that is apparently not moving, nor is it located in geographic space, except negatively (“We’re not going to Okinawa,” Takabe tells Fumie): its windows offer a view of thick clouds being swept past by the wind.