Visitor Q
dir. Miike
Opens Fri June 14
Clinton Street Theater

Visitor Q opens with an inter-title that asks, “Have you ever had sex with your father?” The audience is then treated to a scene in which an older man engages in foreplay, then sex, with a teenaged prostitute, and it soon becomes clear that they are in fact father and daughter. The drawn-out scene, shot on video, seems to pose both a warning and a dare to the audience: Can you handle this? If not, get out now.

Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, the creator of such wickedly skewed gorefests as Audition and Dead or Alive, platforms up to a whole new level of perversity here. The family depicted in Visitor Q makes the Osbournes look like the Cleavers; not only is the father incestuous, he also films his son being beaten and bullied by his classmates. The son, in turn, takes out his aggressions by viciously abusing his mother, who’s also a prostitute (in order to support her heroin habit, of course). Into this mess arrives a nameless stranger who provokes further degradation, including the movie’s justifiably infamous and jaw-dropping projectile lactation scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

There seems to be a new mini-genre afoot of films that skewer traditional notions of family by presenting as outrageously dark a vision as possible of home life. Todd Solondz’ Happiness comes to mind, as does Francois Ozon’s Sitcom. Real cinema geeks might get the reference to Pier Pasolini’s Teorema, in which Terence Stamp plays an anonymous visitor who shakes up a bourgeois family.

But the best cinematic comparison to Visitor Q might be Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered. Both films inspire simultaneous opposed responses. Just as the relentless taboo breaking begins to get old and seem utterly pointless, the sheer chutzpah and lack of self-censorship becomes somehow kind of impressive. This is filmmaking straight from the Id, beyond ordinary notions of judgment or quality: Is he really masturbating a horse? Is that really her milk?

Is there really something going on here? Or is it just 90 minutes of shredding the envelope of good taste in the name of art? The answer to both these questions just may be “yes.”