Movie Review: Caniba (2017)

Caniba (2017)

Directed by: Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel.

Featuring: Renée Hartevelt, Issei Sagawa, Jun Sagawa.

 

Even as far as documentaries about cannibals go, Caniba is strange. The film created a stir on the festival circuit when it came out there in 2017 – but pretty much disappeared after that – distributors guessing (rightly) that most audiences wouldn’t want to endure the films 90-minute runtime. The fil doesn’t give anyone what they would expect in a documentary like this – it gives them something entirely different, more immersive, more disturbing, but also perhaps more exploitative. Watching it all, I got the impression that it was precisely the film that filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel wanted to make – but was at a loss to figure out why they felt the need to make it at all.

 

The subject of the documentary is Issei Sagawa – who became famous when, as a student studying at the Sorbonne, he murdered fellow student Renée Hartevelt, raped her corpse, and then at parts of her body. But Sagawa was declared insane and unfit for trial – and sent back to Japan, where he has eked out a living based on his infamy – writing a manga about what he did, starring in specialized pornography, even being a food critic for a period of time. He also has never been shy about sitting for interviews with documentary filmmakers – and this is hardly the first film about him to be made.

 

That perhaps explain why directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor  & Verena Paravel from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab don’t feel the need to dwell on the details of his crime all that much – we get them in onscreen text at the beginning of the film, before the film dives into a current day portrait of Sagawa – now in his 60s, and suffering from diabetes and the after effects of a stroke – he is now dependent on his older brother, Jun, to care for him. What ends up emerging in the film is a warped study of their brothers themselves – Issei admitting he still wants to eat people – and be eaten himself – and Jun still confessing that he doesn’t understand his brothers desires – before showing us his own rather extreme sadomasochistic desires as well.

 

I feel safe in saying that almost everyone reading this will not want to see Caniba, even those with a perverse fascination with the subject matter itself. The directors aren’t as interested in the details of his crime as clearly other filmmakers have been – and don’t really push Issei to explain what he did, or why. For his part, he seems tired of talking about it as well. While he admits that he is a monster, he also doesn’t really show anything resembling remorse either – and the filmmakers don’t push him to. The filmmaking is odd as well – with its relentless closeups of Issei and Jun, sometimes jostling for the frame. It’s off-putting in the extreme – and that’s even before we get to an extended clip of one of the porn films Issei starred in, or a reading, complete with pictures, of his disturbing manga – or the long sequence of Jun self-abusing. Caniba ends up being exhausting.

 

I have to admit watching the film, I often wondered what the point of it was. Why was Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel – clearly talented filmmakers that anyone who has seen their previous film, Leviathan can attest, making this film? In its own weird, fucked up way, the film I suppose humanizes both Issei and Jun – and invites you to think about your own desires – which are likely more mainstream then their own. Yet the film is also an endurance test – even at just 90 minutes – to see how much you can take, and is perhaps so off-putting that few will get what the filmmakers are going for – or want to. For them – and I think that’s most people – Caniba will be little more than a geek show.