Bullet Ballet.

There are two main similarities between Tokyo Fist (1995) and Bullet Ballet (1998) the first is that director Shinya Tsukamoto takes the lead role and secondly the female lead is another very strong character. This time she is a young women who joins a gang of young street punks to serves her own needs.

Tokyo's Punk Street Gang. 

Filmed in atmospheric black and white and shot in Tokyo, TV commercial film director Aida (Tsukamoto) comes home from the office to find that his girlfriend has committed suicide shooting herself with an untraceable firearm that she’s been asked to look after by a gangster friend. Its not Aida’s day when later a gang of punks beats him up. As a result of these two incidents he becomes obsessed with death and guns. Deciding to extract vengeance he throws himself into a turf war with a ruthless gang of young delinquents. His attempts to purchase a firearm go disastrously wrong when he ends up paying 2.5 million yen for what turns out to be a water pistol filled with sand. So he makes his own gun along with the bullets and sets out to shot the punks in a nightclub, it’s there he first see’s the beautiful young punk girl Chisato (Kirina Mano). Things get worse for Aida who gets involved with a drug fuelled gang battle in the crowded Tokyo streets. But is he beginning to fall in love with the young futuristically dressed punk goddess who seems to have a death wish?

 

Not a good day for Aida!

Nothing is ever explained and with minimal dialogue leaves its audience to decide a meaning or are we back to looking at the link between city and men concept?  The director admitted in an interview that the film was based on the directors feelings at becoming 38 years old, what’s he going to feel like when he turns 60 in 2020!  At the time that the film was made there was the emergence of ‘teamers’ in Japan, these are usually young men who live normal respectable working lives during daytime but who act out violent delinquency at night joining street gangs, the character of Goto is a good example. It was this that was the trigger for Shinya to put pen to paper and camera to eye and make a film based around their exploits. He wanted to depict a battle between young teamers and an older generation. The director also admits being influenced by Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and the American film director Larry Clark.

 

The beautiful  young punk goddess.

Great atmospheric shots of the city from Shinya and like Snake in June (2002) make great use of rain drenched desolate urban landscapes of a non neon lit Tokyo. Heavy violence carrying a certain menace compounded by the demanding metal soundtrack and Shinya’s brilliant direction again dares the voyeur in us all to take our eyes from the screen. A movie that involves guns, violence and destruction all brilliantly intercut with scenes of men at war. Both this movie and Tokyo Fist have a new digital restoration released on Blu- ray, so now’s the best time to sample these examples of Japanese cinema at its best.

Revenge Taxi Driver style.

http://vimeo.com/13463428

Tokyo Fist.

Shinya Tsukamoto admitted that this was his first, although not the last, film to involve a strong woman and Hizuru, played by the very eye catching Kahori Fujii, is certainly a strong character. One that develops into a self aware and self-confident individual in touch with her own personality and feelings. An interesting woman who discovers her physicality and her raw animal instinct. The character of Hizuru is the backbone of the ultra violent Tokyo Fist (1995) she is someone we see change as the film proceeds. Involving the perceived act of self-harm through body piecing’s and tattoos and the taboo of violence carried out by and on women. Where as body violence is generally accepted as a release for certain types of men, in this movie via boxing, it is not generally accepted where women are concerned. Hizuru, although used to the metal abuse given by her husband, discovers that she enjoys receiving physical pain turning her on sexually.

Bitter rivals.

Tsuda Yoshiharzu (the directors first attempt at playing a leading character role) is a hard working insurance salesman for a large corporation who lives a normal and stable life. At the request of his boss he visits a Tokyo boxing gym where he meets Kojima Takuti an old high school classmate turned boxer (played by the Shinya’s younger brother Koji). Tsuda does not won’t anything to do with his old friend but the boxer finds out where he lives and visits his flat to find his wife Hizuru on her own, Kojima makes a play for her but she turns him down. When Tsuda finds out he confronts Kojima who gives our salary man a good beating. After this incident Hizuru goes to watch Kojima box in a tournament when her husband finds out they have a public fight in a restaurant. She gradually becomes more and more obsessed with him and moves in with the boxer. Tsuda knows that he will have to fight to get his wife back so he joins the boxing gym with the sole intent of beating his rival in a physical fight. Attending an arranged meeting with his wife under the motorway to attempt reconciliation, Tsuda gets beaten quite badly by her but he knocks her down with one blow to the face, she gets up brushes herself off and walks calmly away. We witness Tsuda banging his head against a concrete stanchion in frustration. Hizuru returns and beats him again quite mercilessly. On her return to the boxer she instigates frantic sex. In the meantime Kojima is preparing for the fight of his life with a fighter that has already killed an opponent.

 

The eye catching Kahori Fujii.

As I said previously this is a very violent film but one that goes so much deeper than just purely glorifying the act of violence. Tsukamoto claims that the film is the study of the relationship between Tokyo and peoples love and hate they have for the city, although Tokyo is a symbol that could in fact be any large city. It may be about boxing but its no Rocky type hero drama, its shows quite graphically the gritty realism and hypertension involved in the sport. The boxing ring is a metaphor for boundary’s surrounding a city, the soundtrack of beating fists represent life, living and death. If nothing else the director, in what is probable his best film, provocatively askes his audience the question: is it wrong for a woman to desire physical violence and to put herself in a situation where violence is forthcoming? Tom Mes in his guide to Japanese Film opines that this movie is one of the more potent feminist statements of the 1990’s. This movie has a new digital restoration released on Blu- ray so now’s the best time to sample Japanese cinema at its best.

Kotoko.

Shinya Tsukamoto’s reputation as ‘the cyberpunk director’ is based on only two of his 26 credits as a director, Tetsuo, The Iron Man (1989) and Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer (1992) although in 2009 he did make the third film in this cyberpunk film series Tetsuo: The Bullet Man. My own favourite movie in his body of work, and one that I must revisit, is A Snake of June (2002), which is the story of a woman’s physical and sexual reawakening, but I am of the opinion that his latest movie may be his best film to date. Kotoko (2011) premiered at the 68^th Venice International Film Festival where it won the Best Film award in the festivals Orrizonti section (new trends in world cinema), the first Japanese film to do so and premiered in the UK at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2012.

 

Never wanting to leave to confines of her apartment.

Kotoko is a young women who see’s double, self harms by cutting deep wounds into her arms and has a small child although she is not married. She is forced to change neighbourhoods when she beats up a woman for admiring her baby.  Setting up a new home so their visits outside are minimal, but they are again forced to move for a second time. We then witness Kotoko on the apartment buildings roof where she drops the baby on to the concrete below, panicking she rushes back down stairs where she finds the baby alive and well in the flat. This occurrence proves she is incapable of caring for the child, so the authorities remove the infant and place it in the care of Kotoko’s sister. Following the baby’s departure she descends further into a deeper black depression with the self-harming getting worse. When she is allowed to visit her sister she finds that the child is no longer a baby but has grown into a toddler. While at her sisters she happily mixes with the other members of the family and we observe for the first time how content she has become. According to the rules of her controlled visit’s she cannot stay and returns home where the self-harming begins yet again. Suddenly Tanaka, a well-known writer, who unbeknown to her, has been stalking her since her bus journey to visit the child, approaches her. He had heard her singing on the bus and tells her he immediately fell in love and proposes marriage.  But Kotoko gives her answer by stabbing him in the hand with a fork! Not being put off by his first failure he asked her out to dine where he proposes marriage again but the evening comes to an abrupt end when she stabs him in the other hand. Kotoko returns to her flat, Tanaka follows and panics when he discovers her covered in blood from another self-harming episode, even this does not stop him wanting to be with her. With her self-esteem at particularly low ebb the self-harming goes on but things begin to look up when both of them go together to visit her son. She assures him that she can be happy but then beats him so badly that he becomes unrecognisable. It’s eventually agreed that he can move in with her but she continues the beatings unabated. There turbulent relationship is a gruesome bloody affair with him being beaten without offering any resistance and her constant self-harming remaining unchallenged. He even offers to give up his only source of income to give him more time to look after this obviously demented woman.  Things begin to calm down and the violence abates. The only time Kotoko really seems content and at peace with the world is when she is singing. A letter received from her sibling explains that the authorities are letting her son return to her. But on his arrival at her apartment she begins to think that Tanaka could have been a figment of her imagination and starts to see double again, obviously her mental state has taken a turn for the worse. When the child stabs himself in the eye with a colouring pencil she begins to get visions of his death. These visions of impending doom make her worry about the child’s safety so much that she attempts to strangle the child herself.

 

Happier days.

The film obviously is a very difficult watch made even more so when you realise that the actress playing the part of Kotoko, Cocco, has real life problems that mirror these in the film including the self harm and the deep depression’s as well as other acute mental symptoms and eccentricities, thereby actually able to live the part and not just act it. Included in the cast are her real life family members including her sister and her teenage son, with the director, who also did the cinematography, playing the rather unfortunate Tanaka. It was also decided that the cast and crew would be kept to a minimum so as not to overwhelm its star. Tsukamoto first met the J-pop artist when he was filming Vital in 2004 and decided to write a screen play based on her story. The movie’s lead character was based on a composite of Cocco and a fictional character called Ryoko but the main driver behind the character was to capture Cocco’s psyche. A very strong piece of work from the director who was right to cast someone in the lead role that he felt could put across a profound depiction of mental illness and the horrors involved. Cocco also had a young child so she understood the unique bond between mother and child that plays such an important role in the narrative. 

 

How can he still love her?

If the film proves just one thing it is that some people can never really be happy as regularly portrayed in some lightweight ‘feel good movies’ would have us believe and for me Tsukamoto’s latest work is certainly the best antidote for that kind of genre. It has been made quite clear that any humour in this film was highly unintentional but like life, it can move from laughable to awful in a blink of an eye. Audiences around the world reacted strongly to Kotoko, with some people working out of screening. We have to face up to the fact that sometimes violent impulses instinctively exist in the human mind. The violence in Kotoko is not fantasy based but real situations and the overall feeling of despair haunts the movie. A commercially successful film that manages to keep the integrity of Cocco’s original work.