The Katakuris are a family of six, comprising four generations. They take to running a remote guest house on the promise that a soon-to-be constructed road will see their business flourish. However, a distinct lack of guests and stiff competition soon has the family at odds.
Even when their first guests begin appearing, the Katakuris’ luck doesn’t improve and guest after guest is found dead by accident, suicide, or foul play. Besides this, the family is plagued by local authorities, con-men, and internal strife concerning their increasingly morbid business venture. Oh, and a volcano.
Inspired by Kim Jee-woon’s The Quiet Family
This is most often described as a horror-comedy and it’s well known that Takashi’s film is inspired by the South Korean equivalent, The Quiet Family from Kim Jee-woon, but this is very far from being a re-make and very far from being a horror. Takashi uses a basic premise that is not his own as the springboard for a film that couldn’t belong to anyone else and when Takashi sets out to do weird, then you can bet your house that it’ll be weird with a capital W. And E. And I. And R. And D.
The result is a film where music and tempo dictate more than atmosphere, with characters frequently breaking into a song and dance and performing to the rhythm of the score. As if that wasn’t strange enough for the man who made Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer and the unforgettable Audition, Takashi also puts to use several sequences of clay-mation, to shoulder scenes that would otherwise have multiplied the budget ten-fold and been too difficult, if not impossible, to shoot.
Takashi, famous as much for the graphic nature of his work as well as his film-making expertise, shows what happens when he steps away from the extreme and perverse. Namely, everything else happens. Katakuris is a smattering of every kind of genre and the fact that one scene is even half way contiguous to the next says something for Takashi’s madcap mysticism behind the camera.
The Happiness of the Katakuris Cast
The film is littered with incredibly off-kilter performances that under the wrong circumstances would just be laughable instead of amusing.
Tetsuro Tamba (Kwaidan 1964, You Only Live Twice 1967, G-Men ’75 1975-82) is here as Grandfather Ojîsan Jinpei Katakuri, while mother Terue and father Masao are respectively Matsuzaka Keiko (a multi-multi Best Actress Award winner in Japan) and Sawada Kenji (The Man Who Stole the Sun 1979, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters 1985).
The remaining members are made up of son Masayuki and daughter Shizue, played by Takeda Shinji (Taboo 1999) and Nishida Naomi (Nabbie´s love 1999, Train Man 2005), respectively, with Miyazaki Tamaki as the grand-daughter Yurie.
With a film like this, the cast are one for all, all for one, each relying on the other to keep a consistent level of bungling theatrics throughout. It’s a great cast not only because they pull it off (with a little help from Takashi) but because the family is particularly endearing. The cast also includes the memorable Imawano Kiyoshiro as Richâdo Sagawa – a charlatan whose ‘ingenious’ web of lies includes posing as an officer from the U.S Navy and, seemingly, the British Royal Navy, as well as being a British secret agent and half-brother to Queen Elizabeth.
The Happiness of the Katakuris Summary
The key to this film is it’s wacky comedy, whether it’s in seeing a respectable cast break out into a ludicrous song and dance or in elements of an equally ludicrous plot.
That’s not to say that this is Takashi’s best work or that everyone will get along with it. This is, however, Takashi at his eclectic best, utterly unpredictable and unique, and anyone with more than a passing interest in films will probably appreciate that.
Takashi’s message here seems to be one of optimism in the face of adversity and this is ultimately a light-hearted film. With that said, if seeing that optimism coming true to life creates this sort of reality, then one has to wonder if the message isn’t actually saying that optimism is a kind of hopeless madness. Actually, that sounds about right.
- Producer: Yoshida Hirotsugu
- Director: Miike Takashi
- Screenplay: Yamagishi Kikumi
- Starring: Tetsuro Tamba, Matsuzaka Keiko, Sawada Kenji, Takeda Shinji, Nishida Naomi
- Released: Oct 2001 by Katakuri-ke no Kôfuku Seisaku Iinkai & Shochiku Company
- Running Time: 113 mins
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