Issei Sagawa likes Renoir and Disney. He also likes white women with fleshy buttocks—in particular to eat. In 1981, Sagawa killed and partially ate his friend Renée Hartevelt. Caniba, an intimate documentary by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (who made the boldly immersive whaling film Leviathan) brings you uncomfortably close to this remorseless and now ailing man and dares you to react. It’s a fascinating film you won’t ever want to see again, if you can get through it the first time.
The filmmakers do not condone Sagawa’s actions, but they don’t condemn him either, treating him as they would any other subject. In early scenes, the camera lingers on extreme close-ups of Sagawa’s expressionless face. It’s not simply emotional coldness—he’s suffered a stroke, and we watch as his younger brother Jun takes care of him. The elder Sagawa’s deadpan is startling even without context; the image recalls Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns and bears a remarkable similarity to lingering close-ups in Wang Bing’s recent documentary Mrs. Fang, which observed the last days of a matron suffering from Alzheimer’s. As such, Caniba is a provocative take on elder care and forgiveness; do we dare tend to aged criminals?
Yet this is far from a redemption story. Whatever sympathy that might be felt from early images of the now much-weakened killer is diminished as we see his little brother read the manga that the elder Sagawa drew recounting his crime (and the sexual arousal it gave him) in graphic detail.
The movie juxtaposes various other transgressions, as if suggesting that cannibalism may not be its most unpleasant element.Caniba dares the viewer to look away, and seems to ask the viewer what’s their breaking point. While many will turn away immediately or refuse to watch the movie at all, others may be fine with shots of the frail cannibal, even as they last for minutes at a time. But will you draw the line at pixelated porn (from an adult film Sagawa made to capitalize on his infamy—he became something of a celebrity in Japan)? Will you draw the line at the revelation of Jun’s penchant for self-scarification and extended footage of him shredding the skin under his arm with a hair pick?
Jun’s fetish may be extreme, but it’s on a continuum with the common urge of picking a scab, inflicting some sensation of pain, however minimal. What’s startling about this film is that some of its most extreme behavior is a ramped-up version of an urge you may recognize in yourself.
Caniba doesn’t try to explain the Sagawas’ psychology, but home movies of the brothers’ childhood are revealing. Apparently shot by one of their parents, footage shows the children getting inoculated; Jun doesn’t take this well, screaming and crying as the camera zooms in to show the child’s tears; Issei, on the other hand, winces at the injection but takes it in stride. This is a stunning but sometimes unbearable film that, not unlike Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2013 documentary The Act of Killing, asks that we spend time with the most heinous of criminals.
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