Charisma is billed as being "part eco-thriller, part existentialist fable." Goro Yabuike (Koji Yakusho, who most foreign film fans will remember as the lead from the 1996 film Shall We Dance?) is a detective who leaves Tokyo after a hostage situation he walks into takes an unpleasant turn. Seeking solitude in a remote forest, Yabuike eats some magic mushrooms and, predictably, things get pretty weird. Once the viewers get to meet the full cast of characters, which include a soul-sucking and sword-wielding environmentalist, a very special tree (that might be a monster), poisonous women, and skull-smashing men in black, the prognosis is clear; Kurosawa might have sampled the magic mushrooms first.
In a published interview (3.20.2001) for Midnight Eye by Tom Mes (who also provides the liner notes for Charisma), Kurosawa answers a question on genre elements by saying that "Yes, it certainly is a detective story, but it's also a sort of American-style Indiana Jones/two-teams-vying-for-a-treasure film. That's how I started it. But instead of a box of treasure I decided to make the treasure a tree that's in a forest. Then you start to imagine 'what value does the tree have...and 'what is the condition of the forest it's growing in?" Then you start to realize that you're not making an Indiana Jones movie at all, but you're making a much more complex film."
Speaking of boxes, Kurosawa is clearly obsessed with frames and how film presents stories that are bordered within squares (or, in the case of this film since it was shot 1.85:1, rectangles). Kurosawa, however, is always "thinking outside the box" and has an uncanny ability to coax viewers to think about the world beyond the borders too. He does this in various ways. Aesthetically, he avoids close-ups and riddles his compositions with squares and rectangles that telescope out from foreground to background, just keep an eye on all the doorways and windows in Charisma, and this despite much of the film being shot in exterior locations! And unlike the favored close-ups of western cinema, Kurosawa prefers medium and long shots, which have the added benefit of allowing Kurosawa to stimulate his viewer's peripheral vision with quick blink-and-you-miss-it shots where "the action" is shoved to the far side of the screen. The soundtrack is also key to Kurosawa's efforts to extend on the world beyond the borders of the film frame, but not just in the usual way; some brief scenes are stripped of all sound (even "room noise"), which is a way of making the viewer aware of sound (by first noting its absence), so that when the soundtrack returns even a babbling brook is given prominence. While the film will admittedly have most people scratching their heads, anyone who delights in rich compositions and unusual narratives will find many surprises here.
Home Vision Entertainment's dvd release of Charisma includes a short (6 minute) interview with Kurosawa (where he candidly says that "even now I'm not sure what kind of film Charisma turned out to be"), a 30-minute-long "Making of" documentary that includes a lot of raw, video footage taken from the sidelines, and trailers for Charisma, Seance, and Cure.
For more information about Charisma, visit Home Vision Entertainment. To order Charisma, go to TCM Shopping.
by Pablo Kjolseth
