Double Suicide is based on an early 18th century puppet theater play titled The Love Suicides at Amijima. The transformation of a play featuring puppets controlled by puppetry masters into film is easy enough if one intends to make a kind of animated feature. To transform puppets into people while still retaining the effect of the human puppetry masters controlling the strings is obviously an intent to say something about the human condition.
Director Masahiro Shinoda could simply have told the story in conventional terms replacing the puppets with human actors playing the characters. This would have a simple narrative that pulls the audience into the tragedy implied by the title through emotional connections. That is not what the film seeks to do, however. In fact, that is just the opposite. Double Suicide is an example of the detached storytelling that aims purposely to obstruct emotional connection between the characters and viewers and instead pull them into the narrative intellectually.
This Brechtian form of drama is easy enough to do on stage which already enjoys a built-in sense of artifice, but film has always sought to replicate realism more than theatrical drama. The same story that can be told with profound emotional connection at its center in a film often lacks that element in the stage version from which it was adapted. Filmmakers as a general rule rely more upon emotional connection than intellectual engagement and do so for a variety of reasons. Thus, a film director like Shinoda is pushed to violate cinematic rules and conventions for the seemingly paradoxical intent of putting a big wall between the characters and the emotional response of those in the audience.
Even the most fanatic of film fans generally are aware of these rules and conventions only in a subconscious way or, more precisely, through negative apprehension. Which is to say that they become consciously aware that there are “rules” to filmmaking only when those rules are being violated. It is the violation of technical conventions of the craft of filmmaking that create that awareness of something in a scene being “off.” This is precisely the craftsmanship that Shinoda manipulates and exploits in his directorial influence over the pre-existing narrative of Double Suicide which succeeds in conveying an aesthetic understanding in viewers that they are not supposed to be connecting with the story in the usual way.
What makes Double Suicide a cinematic experience that almost everyone who watches it feel is not quite like anything they ever have seen before (even today when there is almost nothing that hasn’t been seen before even in mainstream films) are these violations of cinematic rules that jar one into the awareness that such rules do exist. Rule violations range from the exceedingly technical like the 180-degree rule to the more familiar like freeze-frames to the more direct like drawing attention to the artificiality of the sets to the jarring like the completely unexpected cut revealing the Japanese technique of ohaguro. This effect of blacking out the teeth of a character to create a disturbing momentary lack of recognition is more recognizable today as a result of Asian horror films, but it still has the power to shock in a film that is obviously not working within that genre.
The genius of what Shinoda does in Double Suicide lies in its paradox. He manipulates the subconscious awareness by the audience of cinematic “rules” to instill an emotional imbalance that feeds off years of watching film to consciously inform them that something is “off” in order to obstruct the natural emotional connection established between narrative and viewer. The result is the intent: a necessary repositioning of their part in the perception of the flickering images on screen that now must make an intellectual investment simply to figure out why things seem not quite right.
