Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#26 Post by swo17 » Thu Jun 18, 2020 3:27 pm

Yeah, I got that notification today too

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#27 Post by chatterjees » Thu Jun 18, 2020 7:04 pm

I just received mine today from VCI.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#28 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jun 19, 2020 11:12 am

I really enjoyed The Adventures of Denchu-Kozo which feels much lighter and for the lack of a better word 'manga-esque' (i.e. a story about teen heroes and wacky villains having fights in heightened worlds) than the Tetsuo films which play on the fears of horrific forced transformations. Here our hero "Electric Rod Boy" is an amiable sort who after showing off an improvised time machine device ends up getting thrown into an apocalyptic future where cyber-vampires are keeping the world in perpertual darkness by regularly setting off "Adam" bombs into the atmosphere ("Adam"/"Atom"?) whilst also growing a new Eve-figure who will be their legacy. Our hero meets up with a female mentor figure who looks suspiciously like his girlfriend from his own time, who has been waiting for his arrival in order to battle the vampiric forces of darkness once and for all. But it does not go quite to plan.

Lots of wonderful elements to this short film, especially the live action stop-motion sequences (and very phallic-like sculpture transportation devices!) that feel as if they were carried across into the Tetsuo films. I really like that the main heroine either at school or in the future is played by Nobu Kanaoka, almost anticipating the tripling of Meg Ryan's character in Joe Versus The Volcano(!), as wherever and whenever our hero travels the perfect woman is there to greet him (and of course there is an inevitable reason for the resemblance between the characters, revealed at the end!). That really makes this first disc of the set a tribute to not just the Tetsuo films and Tomorow Taguchi's lead role but also to Nobu Kanaoka, who appears in the all three films (Tom Mes is a little dismissive of her role as 'wife' in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, especially following her much wilder performances in Denchu-Kozo and the first Tetsuo film, but I think despite being a supporting role her character is the true heart of that particular film and the same kind of character that would evolve to be given much more prominence in later films such as Tokyo Fist and A Snake of June. She grieves for the loss of her son, and later on grieves for her husband too, but comes to accept his fully self-actualised new form. She also does all of the investigating and, whilst kidnapped, interacts more with the main villains than our main character ever manages to) . Kei Fujiwara, who after this played the girlfriend in the first Tetsuo film, appears in Denchu-Kozo as the 'Eve' figure, who gets an astonishing arc of being sexually assaulted whilst 'underage' to towering topless above the town, belching out smoke, like a cyber-punk 50ft Woman!

And a lot of the psycho-sexual pre-occupations are in Denchu-Kozo as much as in Tetsuo, as our well endowed hero gets teased for it by a few bullies at school (including Tsukamoto himself I think!) untill his sword-wielding girlfriend comes in to run them off. Although that also begins the running joke (and probably the main reason for having the electric rod growing out of his back) of our hero, whilst bowing his apologies to the bullies, ending up giving them an accidental bop on the head with the end of his rod! Throughout the rest of the short his electric rod gets highlighted in different ways, from being gifted a lamp to hang on the end of it by the mentor from the future ('completing him'? Maybe a metaphor for taking his virginity, but in a gentler way than Eve's is taken?) to at his lowest ebb another time travelling samurai-style uber-masculine figure coming in to berate our hero into doing his duty to save the future after having been 'slacking off' in the past for so long! This character also has an electricity pole growing from him, but he's older and more experienced so he has an 'electric pylon' rather than our younger hero's stubbier (though still unwieldy) 'electric rod'!

It is all phrased much better in Tsukamoto's interview about the film: "Although he has a complex because of his electrical pylon, he travelled into the future and lit up the darkness"!

So a lot of the sublimated into sci-fi sexuality elements already seem to be present, but in this short they are channeled into fighting off an actual threat from antagonists and saving the world before getting to go back home. Which is very different from the Tetsuo films which involve internalised mingling of rage and desire bubbling up and leading to transformation, lashing out at individuals at first before then transforming the world entire by their climaxes (with Tetsuo II destroying the sepia toned myth of the happy family as it goes).
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Jul 24, 2020 2:59 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#29 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jun 19, 2020 1:48 pm

Tokyo Fist
"The only way a coward like him can win is by mastering mind control"

Major spoilers:

I had not realised until watching Tokyo Fist again that it feels as if it anticipates Fight Club by years. And whilst we know that Scorsese likes Tetsuo: The Iron Man and A Snake of June from interviews, Tokyo Fist is the film that really feels Scorsese-esque, with its boxing matches as a sublimation of frustrated domestic interpersonal relationships feeling very in the vein of Raging Bull, even down to the head beating on the wall, which in this case has the guy saved from having to do all of the work himself by the female member of the trio helpfully administering a barrage of extra punches!

I liked that the possessive paranoia of the husband towards his 'property' being tampered with sort of overwhelms the 'truth' of the situation (that we in the audience are privileged to see, of high school boxer friend Kojima planting a kiss on Hizuru, and then being bluntly rebuffed by her). It does not matter if it is 'true' or not, just that Tsuda feels possessive of his wife and that he has been made to look foolish by Hizuru's 'fooling around', which is sort of mingling in with his testosterone fuelled side being reawakened with his growing fascination with boxing and eventual competition with Kojima's boxer. Hizuru for her part does not have any truck with either of the rather troubled men in her life, and she realises pretty early on that she is the the piece of property being used as a proxy for two men more obsessed with each other than her in particular. The development here is that the metallic transformations are transferred to the female character with her exploration of body modifications and slowly realised sense of masochism, whilst the guys are more into hitting the gym and destroying their bodies in a more fleshy sublimated desire manner this time around. The only place they can vent their frustrations appropriately is in the ring.

This is the male-centric companion piece to A Snake of June and lots of motifs appear here that appear again in that later film - the unwanted intrusion of a third party into the 'normal' (but deathly dull and lacking) life of a middle class couple; the nuisance phone calls; the medical check up being a stand in for deeper illness; the woman exploring herself more successfully on her own whilst the two guys swap antagonist and protagonist roles and end up merging together (which is also the big carry over from the Tetsuo films). And that great moment with lots of edits of Hizuru ripping out her earrings, nose ring and piercings before dumping a glass of water over her head is kind of A Snake of June in minature!

And I love that montage scene that occurs at almost the exact mid-point of the film of all the characters looking at the moon, including the ailing parent in hospital and the similarly seeming mentally impaired boxing gym manager, which has the great line from another boxer (with a similar scar on his head) who walks in to the moonlit closed gym that: "I was on my way back home but the moon brought me back here". Which is very like the hyper-masculine but touchingly flawed gang of guys in Tetsuo II wanting to induct fresh faced new members into their scarred (physically and mentally) club, and which scene then moves into Kojima relating to Hizuru an explanatory flashback to childhood vigilanteism (frustrated not consumated this time around, but similarly repressed and 'forgotten' by our salaryman 'hero') which is very similar in nature to the traumatic flashback in Tetsuo II.

I love the 'desolation montage' as after Hizuru at first fails to meet Tsuda under the freeway (very Ballardian!) there is a sequence of shots of his character all around the city from the heights of skyscrapers down into the depths of the most cramped corridors and sewers until he ends back where he began. Which like the earlier cyberpunk films, and as the brief escape into looking at the city during the intermission between rounds in the bareknuckle match between the two suggests, this is still very much about a conflict between two people being extrapolated out into affecting the entire city that they inhabit. And that final scene of all three characters destroying their bodies (one in the ring; one in the hospital; one in imagination as she rips out her piercings), separate but linked together through juxtaposition (One destroyed by anger, one destroyed but victorious, one transcendent. But which is which might depend on the audience member) reaching their end is almost like the end of Requiem For A Dream.

I particularly like that Tsuda is never going to be able to beat Kojima, but in forcing a fight in which he exhausts Kojima and getting pummelled into a pulp, he masochistically exhausts his opponent just before Kojima's own big fight. Kojima then similarly goes through his own disfiguring pummelling at the hands of someone more brutally skilled. The guys need others to force their transitions, or at least motivate them into doing the otherwise unthinkable, whilst Hizuru is the only member of the threesome with a kind of agency, whose transformation is coming from within herself, even if she is similarlly pinballing between anger and sympathy towards her two flawed and needy beaus. Perhaps making her closer to the character of the "Metal Fetishist" from the first Tetsuo, though the difference here feels that the piercings and tattoos are more just an externalised symbol of a change that she almost outgrows the need for by the end of the film, rather than it being the be all and end all of full body transformation as in the Tetsuo films.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#30 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jul 10, 2020 4:04 am

Bullet Ballet
[Typed up on a computer screen and then printed out]: “At midnight tomorrow Chisato will die”
(Balling up the printout) “Who the hell cares”

I still have the more recent films to watch but it will take a lot to knock Bullet Ballet off its spot as my favourite of Tsukamoto’s films. But really its an embarrassment of riches at this point, as Bullet Ballet is building on a lot of the themes on display in the previous films and putting them into a ‘real world’ context. This feels like the climax of gun fetishism in Tsukamoto's films, and it is difficult to imagine where things could go in that area from here. People want to merge with guns in this film, and burn and cut their flesh to feel anything, but there is never a jump into actual sci-fi merging with metal as in the Tetsuo films. Similarly we get another mild mannered salaryman protagonist having his world upended by his relationship with a shadowy underworld group and relationship with someone who is both not good for him and a key to his liberation, but here that takes the form of a rather aimless street gang of youths rather than larger than life figures (even the boxer old acquaintance of Tokyo Fist) standing in for repressed forbidden desires. In a really nice way it could be argued that the protagonist Goda is the one whose grief-driven motivations throws the underworld antagonists’ world into upheaval instead! It is there in the earlier films too but this also maybe anticipates A Snake of June to come, with the outwardly passive character having the more turbulent internal emotions within them, just waiting for the catalysing action that causes it to be unleashed upon the wider world!

This is a relatively simple story: the middle aged advertising executive protagonist Goda returns late from drinking after work to find that his girlfriend has committed suicide in their apartment with a gun, and in his grief of trying to work through his emotions over why she did such a thing, as well as perhaps an attempt to follow her, Goda then goes on a journey through the streets of Tokyo in search of the same make of gun. But what will happen if and when he gets his hands on it?

However from this small, intimate premise the film expands out wonderfully beyond just Goda’s story. The first section of the film revolves around Goda but in his quest for a gun we get a great sense of the teeming underworld life on the streets of Tokyo (I love that really brief moment of going up to the drug dealer on the street to ask about weaponry and being rebuffed, and we see as he walks away a couple of schoolgirls going up to the drug dealer next!). There is an interesting approach to the presence of foreigners here, as the shifty figures hanging around who potentially will have access to the object you are looking for, but more often than not will be bewildered by you just not wanting to buy drugs! Eventually that leads to Goda taking a more DIY approach to building his weapon, though that does not exactly pay off either (which I took, as with the plastic toy gun weighted with sand that the yakuza fobs him off with, as an amusing call back to the Tetsuo films. Our protagonist here is not as skilled with metal as the characters in those films were, as a metal fetishist who needs to be enabled by others rather than spontaneously producing it from within himself! Similarly the sketched in but eventually crucial boxer subplot here feels like an ironic echo of Tokyo Fist; and I think the gang leader’s use of drugs is the ‘real world’ version of the gang leader in Tetsuo II injecting all of his gang with the metal transformation bolts that only cause them to self destruct quicker), before that ''appealing to foreigners' aspect unexpectedly pays off with the prostitute and the quite beautiful scene of trading a gun in exchange for a green card marriage to stay in the country.

So now Goda has a gun and we get that montage scene of him exploring every element of the bathroom where his girlfriend shot herself, from the bullet hole in the window to sitting in the position she was presumably in when she shot herself with the gun to his head. But instead of committing suicide, the character and the film goes onward. But into what?

This is where Goda’s interactions with a local punk street gang, and particularly the female member of the gang Chisato (who at some point before the events of the film he saved from getting hit by a subway train and only got a deep bite on the hand for his trouble) come back into play. They had previously beaten Goda up earlier in the film, and on first making his handmade weapon he decides to revenge himself on them (Just for something to do? To feel anything? To masochistically pay for whatever neglect of his girlfriend he feels?), and gets beaten up again. Now on having an actual gun Goda is suddenly a real threat to the gang, though his attempts to interact with them again take place in the middle of a pre-planned street gang turf war, and in his attempts to interject himself and his own issues into the situation he almost inadvertently ends up saving Chisato’s life. Though he immediately loses his gun to the gang and is back to being impotent.

If Tokyo Fist was Tsukamoto’s take on Raging Bull, then in this subplot of revenge this could be seen as Tsukamoto’s version of Taxi Driver (especially when we get to the long haired, vest wearing leader of the gang who feels very like Harvey Keitel’s pimp character) with its mentally troubled vigilante situated within a wider world that has its own troubles and injustices going on within it. And I guess that makes the character of Chisato a similar figure in need of protection to the character played by Jodie Foster who motivates the action in the Scorsese film. Only in this case the gang leader is the only older figure and all the others are young kids being led astray, not just the girl in the situation.

It is a film about grief and how people deal with it by finding distractions or other diverting coping mechanisms. But it also feels a bit about ‘posturing’ versus actual ‘death wishes’, though with the interesting idea that the ‘posturing’ is more truthful in some ways! Or at least character revealing, because if a character actually has a death wish (like the girlfriend at the beginning) they are just gone, and the characters we spend the film with are those who feel like they want to die (often because they feel worthless, or aimless, in the face of the wider cruelties of the world), but who when the moment comes cannot pull that trigger or react cowardly when they realise that they are on the losing side of a fight, or are actually going to be killed. Only Goda and Chisato feel like characters who actually understand the heavy toll of death and do not treat it as a game (unlike the other gang members) so much as they are obsessed by the idea of death and what it means to be so close to that edge, with the sense that while they often live through their experiences (and cannot actively kill themselves – they want others to do it for them) they do not really care if they do die. The other big Tsukamoto connection feels to be with Cronenberg's work and this film is close to being the Crash equivalent (though with elements of Videodrome with the characters fondling their weapons over their scarred bodies; and in Ballard terms it is perhaps closer to something like Super-Cannes, with the elite taking liberating trips down into the urban center of town in order to experience the thrills of casual street violence to just feel alive again), with a traumatic experience thrusting someone into an underworld of illegal but stimulating gang activities.

It is also a generational film. We have the youngsters in the gang with Chisato looking wistfully at kids in an opposite building sitting their exams at one point; or Goto trying to leave the gang by dressing up in a suit and going for an interview at an advertising firm before being caught in the act and having to perform a transgressive criminal act to prove his loyalty to the gang with Goda’s purloined gun, which is the act that ends up destroying the gang. This is the second big section of the film following Goda’s quest to create the gun, as we get into Goto’s similarly blackly comic and stymied a couple of times attempts to use it on people, from a policeman he has a small feud with (played by Tomorrow Taguchi!) who comes to seem rather pathetic and not worth killing, to Goda himself who is not suitable because he does not care about dying, to eventually just randomly shooting the destined for great things aspiring boxer at the local gym. Probably because that boxer has a shot at a life outside of the criminal one, and reminds Goto of his stunted ambitions to escape, but ironically killing the boxer brings the actual organised gangsters that he was affiliated with down hard in retribution on this small gang of drug addicted, petty fighting punk kids (Similar to that earlier small scene of Goda trying to revenge himself on that guy who was going to sell him a gun but then cheated him, only to find himself in the middle of an actual organised assassination of that character!)

Then we get the middle aged Goda who has a salaryman position ironically working at the ad agency that Goto was interviewing for but is throwing it all away in his grief to pursue the gang (to pursue masochistic feelings?). So Goto and Goda are pursuing different path-crossing goals – one into respectability, the other into the underworld – and neither are going to be left fulfilled.

Even more interesting is that final organised crime figure who hunts down the gang after the boxer is killed is a much older man than even Goda, a figure from the Second World War generation (and played by Hisashi Igawa, a regular in Akira Kurosawa's films from 1970 onwards - he plays the trusted aide in Ran who kills the younger brother on behalf of the middle one during the early battle but also draws the line at taking Lady Sue's head as demanded by Lady Kaede later on - and star of Teshigahara's Pitfall. He also appears as a gang boss in Takeshi Kitano's Boiling Point), who gives a much needed and deadly serious lesson in violence to these posturing, bat waving, never off their mobile phone, smirking young thugs by quickly and brutally killing and/or beating to within an inch of their lives all of the gang (and Goda) holed up in the gang boss’s dilapidated warehouse.

And it is also about the greatest fear of all: to continue living on after someone has gone (explored to its fullest extent in Vital), and after the supreme moment has passed what happens when you are still left hanging around, alive but at a loose end. That leads to one of the most beautiful endings in film that is a kind of hopeful, but still inconclusive race into an uncertain future. As in Crash, maybe the next one will do it.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Aug 10, 2020 4:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#31 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Jul 23, 2020 1:57 pm

A Snake of June
“Don’t worry about how people react. Just show them who you really are”

A woman working for a telephone counselling service and in a rather staid marriage gets reciprocal forced attention from a man she has helped too well to explore her own desires.

I love the ambiguity of whether these compromising photographs of Rinko are captured surreptitiously or portals into her inner desires that the stalker has somehow captured on film! Was Rinko desiring for somebody to look through her window one day, or see her on her balcony? Or, as we see later in the enormous number of negatives that the photographer passes over, was he just following Rinko around in every part of her life (including visiting her ailing mother-in-law alone on behalf of the busy at work husband) and so knows almost everything about her routines, public and private, that way?

I think especially that first "female" sequence is a better film about the notion of 'shame' than the later Shame was! Rinko follows the stalker’s orders at first to reclaim the negatives showing her masturbating or contemplating the mini-skirt or the vibrator, but eventually turns the tables by feeling able to exhibit herself without any shame in front of the camera. It is not about being forced anymore, but again despite getting the initial push (like Tokyo Fist) she has outgrown those around her to take control of her own desires again. (I had to laugh at the sultry eyeing up of the greengrocer after the embarrassed first visit for phallic shaped vegetables turns into a confident stride past that makes him go a bit weak at the knees instead!)

And then it becomes about the husband doing the exact same thing of trying to get all of the incriminating photographic evidence back (behind Rinko's back) and even offering to pay blackmail money for them, which shows that he has not learnt his lesson either about trying to maintain respectability and normality (as with the way that his upset at Rinko needing a mastectomy has unwittingly pushed her to decline treatment), taking the photographs left lying out in the open not as a gift but as an admission of infidelity. So the lesson there involves the photographer revealing a metallic Tetsuo-like appendage and providing a Tokyo Fist-style pummeling, because that's male-male intimacy for you I suppose! But it helps in a way to re-awaken the husband's intimacy for his wife, especially as the third party eventually removes themselves from the equation.

The approach to photography as a medium is particularly interesting. It is capturing a moment but those moments are fixed in time and even more shocking by being exposed so explicitly. The photographs are beautiful but dead, because the subjects (unless they are inanimate objects like the latest must have blender) have moved on and changed (mutated?) into a new form as soon as the shutter was pressed. The present is not being captured, but the past - the past needs, the past desires, the past actions - and that contrasts interestingly against the inactive present with the husband and the desires for the future. The camera itself eventually becomes almost a film camera in that set piece backalley scene shooting from the car, clicking away almost at 24 frames a second. But even that is only capturing a moment that has immediately passed, as ephemeral yet constant as the never ceasing rainfall.

I really like the different use of cameras as well, which are really the fetish objects du jour for this film as much as the gun was in Bullet Ballet (no wonder Scorsese liked it!). The first line of the film is a photographer cockily describing that in his professional camera work that "A small camera won't do. It has to be a big camera with a flash. Otherwise you can't make her come". That is what gets used in the scene in the back alley for Rinko's ultimate display of exhibitionism - the 'professional' camera all set for a porn photoshoot - yet after she 'comes' the photographer changes to the smaller, less violent camera for more intimate and revealing snapshots. And then there is the childhood pinhole camera, dug out of storage, going back to the ur-camera, the device that kicked off a lifetime obsession from the earliest age, used again to take a farewell photograph at the other end of a life.

That reminds me that this has the pairing ailing parents in hospital subplot to Tokyo Fist (a mother here compared to the father in Tokyo Fist), with the husband's lack of intimacy extending beyond his wife to his mother as well, keeping too much of a respectful distance from the messy business of end of life care. In a way there are a lot of enriching throughlines from the earlier films on display here again, particularly to the first Tetsuo film with a recurrent motif in that first section of the main character ending up in public toilets, pleading with the antagonist to leave them alone, but also in that slightly erotic joy of sharing a meal scene which is much more benign than the one in Tetsuo! (Though perhaps it captures the same sense of a woman happily enjoying a meal being disturbing to the man watching on, slightly perturbed!) As with the difficulty telling whether we are seeing sweat or beads of mercury in Tetsuo, here the blue-tinted photography leads to an ambiguity about whether we are seeing rain or tears, just as the moans can be of pain, frustration or pure ecstasy.

I am still a bit in the dark at the moment as to the use of astronomy in the film – the picture of the moon, the observatory building which becomes Rinko's place of respite away from her husband - perhaps it is partially about photography and grasping the intangible and incredibly distant yet always enticingly visible object of desire? The whole film feels as if it is lit by moonlight.
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This time around however I was most taken by the way that the husband stealing a gun from a belligerent policeman introduced earlier in the film and using it to blow away the photographer (in fantasy) and the link to the photographer by destroying the mobile phone (in reality, which also luckily prevents him from murdering his wife as well! And it is kind of a callback to the electronic pocket organiser that tellingly takes the metal transformation bullet that the wife finds in the protagonist's suit in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, damaged on one side but intact on the other, showing that the transformation is actually coming from within rather than having been imposed from without), is kind of a consummated version of the subplot from Bullet Ballet! I kind of love that the final scene is of our main couple finally making passionate shameless love together with their intimacy fully restored, all whilst the police sirens are going off and people are knocking worriedly at their door! It makes a nice contrast to the spatial separation of the characters in Bullet Ballet to have the final moment here being a coupling instead.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#32 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Aug 08, 2020 1:24 pm

Haze
"I just had a dream of waking up somewhere... I found myself waking up alone in a room. It was already dark. I must've dozed off on the sofa. I remember the TV was showing a still image of a town. The weather forecast was scrolling at the bottom of the screen all the time"

I jumped over Vital for the moment to watch Haze, which I had not had the opportunity to see before. Its a fascinating almost totally abstract film that is definitely not for those nervous about enclosed spaces! A man wakes up (over and over again) inside restrictive concrete tunnels that taper off into darkness with only a stab wound (which he discovers with a shocked almost "what have I done?" cry similar to that of the character in Tetsuo: The Iron Man does on unbandaging his leg) and no memory of how he got there. Often at the end of these tunnels there is nothing but a brick wall, or spikes (as in trap rooms inside pyramids), or some hammer insisting on creating a pounding headache. Yet the character crawls onwards, crawling on his back, or sliding back first down an incline, or in by far the most wince-inducing scene having his mouth clamped open on a pipe and having to scrape his teeth along it in the vain hope of reaching a point where the pipe comes to an end (which horrifically but blackly comically ends up being a concrete wall so he has to brace himself to scrape all the way back the way he came to try the other direction instead!), in a very Tetsuo-like image of flesh biting down on metal and one giving way to the other!

Everything is left so vague that at first almost any interpretation could be placed on what is happening. Is it a case of Saw-style torture porn abduction, with the character being dumped into an industrial hellscape? Is it a situation of being a prisoner of war, as the character speculates at one point? I like the idea, especially when we see other characters inside the maze begging for mercy then being systematically killed and dismembered, that it could be a kind of horrific alien abduction scenario!

But really in the end (spoilers) the situation is mostly understandable as a metaphorical one. The character begins unaware of where he is and what he has done to be in such a situation. As he gains a modicum of awareness that is when the pain starts to be inflicted on him at its greatest intensity (the teeth on the pipe scene, which also includes his hands feeling their way along a barbed wire wall and bare feet trying to pick their way through a floor of spikes). Then he moves out of that and into being hit in the head with a mallet until he starts to look and feel for a way out. He begins to dodge the blows and eventually gets away from the rhythmic thumping altogether, though he is still going backwards at that point. But even sliding headfirst down a slope he manages to just about avoid getting impaled on waiting spikes.

Then as he is levering himself up he sees other people through a peephole (much like the peepholes the kids spy on their parents through in Tetsuo II, or especially the device the husband is forced to wear in A Snake of June), begging and praying to an unseen force that dispatches them. Then briefly a crying woman surrounded by dismembered body parts. As he has started to regain a sense of self and begun to navigate his environment, no matter how crazy it is, our protagonist is less taking the pain himself but more observing others going through that process instead. Going from subjective to objective in a way. He apologises (to the bodies specifically? the woman? himself? For not being able to help any of them?) and continues on crawling.

Then he reaches the charnal house itself, a kind of lower level filled with body parts plus the still alive woman with a similar stab wound to his own. They despairingly discuss their situation (the most moving scene of the film) and whilst the man is despairing and about to give up the woman decides to attempt to 'go out the way people come in' through the bloody sluice gate that is filled with body parts (that sort of anticipates the processing machine in Under The Skin by years!). After she decides to press on whether he is coming or not, he ends up following her (putting his trust in her, or simply because he does not want to be alive but alone in this place, even if that means they die together?) and on the water filling the tunnel further on (and with an ominous bestial rumbling coming from the darkness behind them) and having to dive under the water, he surfaces inside a vertical shaft that leads him...
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... into a normal looking apartment. In danger of being drowned by the rising bloody water (or just blood?) he manages to lever the lid of the shaft open and get into the room. Immediately he 'wakes' again and whilst the shaft is suddenly gone the woman is there bleeding out from a stab wound with a carving knife next to her. Stabbed himself he crawls to the phone and calls the emergency services to come and save them.
A fascinating film, I kind of see it as another take on suicidal despair and the lack of vitality in the life of the characters but (as is the case of most of Tsukamoto's other works) an idea of what shift might occur in order to drive a person at such an extreme of life (of ennui, or depression. Or general 'lack' in their current situations) to just keep on crawling through hell and high water rather than giving up entirely, even when there is little to no encouragement given that what they are moving towards is anything better than what came before. Just differently painful.
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I also think it is kind of a view of what might have happened if the couple from Bullet Ballet had attempted to commit suicide together rather than the girlfriend killing herself alone in the apartment before that film even started. That scene inside the water filled tunnel where the man is scared and is begging the woman "Let's go back and have a rethink", whilst the woman simply cannot and they share a tender moment ("Don't give up") before she takes the plunge first is almost a beat for beat abstraction of an attempted double suicide, with the man having scared second thoughts but the woman entirely committed to the action. Despite being together she still goes without him (unlike the Tetsuo films where the two characters merge together, here man and woman, as in all of Tsukamoto's work really, always remain separate entities).

I like to think that this whole concrete maze is kind of an expression of the protagonist's mind slipping away, and of his blood washing down the drain, from which he then literally painfully crawls back out of into consciousness to regain some agency in the real world. In a way that also makes sense of the early hallucination that the character has of being face to face with a tiny version of himself, if we think of the industrial concrete grimy pipework (that stands in for so many images of narrow, cramped alleys that occur in Tsukamoto's films - the one that always strikes me the most is the dead cat in the alley in Tokyo Fist that repulses the main character and then on returning to the alley later on the dead animal is gone and the scene washed down, the only sign of something having been there a patch of wet ground. Somehow I always end up thinking of that moment in conjunction with the scenes of the discovery and killing of the dog in the original Insomnia film) as being a kind of literalisation of the drainage system that the stabbed character's lifeblood is wastefully seeping away into.

The protagonist is pulling himself away from death at the last moments and trying to save his girlfriend/wife too. So whilst Tom Mes suggests a bit in his commentary that this might potentially be the aftermath of a scene of domestic violence (which ties in with his great comments on this film being a kind of take on Buddhist hell), I think it is a bit more optimistic in suggesting a love that took both characters to the brink of death, and maybe beyond it. There is a quite interesting ambiguity about the final scenes (similar to the ambiguity surrounding the present or removed breast on Rinko in the final moments of A Snake of June) as after we see the man as older, without his girlfriend/wife and in the wide open space of a city rooftop, fondling his shirts in the breeze seemingly in fond reminiscence of a lost love, we move to a beautiful, almost Lynchian, shot of the couple young again sitting together on a couch in a darkened room, their faces occasionally illuminated by bright flashes (from a television screen?) as they hold hands without needing to look at each other. Maybe that was the last moment before they did what they did to send them into (as Tom Mes suggests on his commentary) a form of concretised Buddhist hell?
In that sense this is also quite similar to some of Junji Ito's works. It starts off a bit like The Enigma of Amigara Fault with the claustrophobic travelling through an enclosing seemingly never ending tunnel, but eventually comes close to the suicidal tone of Ito's adaptation of No Longer Human. But it is also looking forward quite interestingly to the domestic mental breakdown which occurs in Kotoko.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#33 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Aug 17, 2020 4:41 am

Vital
A young man recovers from a car accident but has amnesia. His parents are keen to let him recover in his own time, but when he discovers a medical book of his own accord and wants to study medicine they are delighted as it was something he had been following in the footsteps of his father in doing. We follow this character (almost completely mute for the first quarter or so of the film, and taciturn after he begins speaking) as he begins training for his course and in acing his workload attracts the breathless attentions of a young woman, who bluntly dumps her (professor) boyfriend in order to follow this new crush. But the next module is dissection and a telltale tattoo on the body he has to dissect suggests that he may have had a previous relationship with the cadaver…

It might be the ultimate in perversity to describe Vital as perhaps Tsukamoto’s most sentimental film up to this point. It is kind of his version of a Love Story or Dying Young style romantic drama, which gets around the inevitable ‘downer ending’ by moving it earlier in the film! A romantic etching of a lost love in their golden prime becomes a lovingly detailed pencil sketch of the coils of her intestines instead, both attempts to capture a moment of a person before they are gone forever. The ticking clock of when the loved one is going to die instead here becomes the ability to be intimate with a lover on a much (much!) deeper level but only for as long as the four month dissection class lasts, and the inevitability of decomposition itself forcing the parting.

For a film that is skirting right up to the edge of necrophilia it is really interesting to see how Tsukamoto handles the rather taboo subject of death and clinical bodily dismemberment. I seem to remember reading somewhere that there is quite a stigma about showing bodies being cut up in the media in Japan (It is why the Japanese zombie film has only been a relatively recent development, and even then more taking place in the independent filmmaking scene. I think the recent Resident Evil games also got censored in Japan by being optically darkened during the more graphic gore scenes. Which makes me wonder if that is why the bodily mutation rather than destruction theme is often given more primacy, especially in Tsukamoto’s work), so violating bodily integrity in such a frank way that gets performed here is perhaps already transgressive enough. The autopsy scenes have their gory moments but it never feels as if the camera is dwelling on the gore for its own sake, more just showing what is necessary to portray the work that goes into the process of cutting apart a cadaver into its component parts, but only small parts of the process and is more often than not trying to respectfully keep its distance from gawping at the laid out body (and especially refraining from the potential for full frontal nudity as much as possible, which is an interesting touch, especially coming after A Snake of June put that aspect front and centre as an essential element of a living, vibrant relationship).

It is surprisingly discreet in what gets shown for much of the time, showing a lot of respect for the bodies of the dead that have been donated throughout, even if our main character himself is reacting strangely possessively towards his body (and on the other end of the spectrum we get the other students professional during their work but after everything has been finally put away and the bodies finally placed into their coffins to go for their funerals then goofing around a bit flippantly, both to relax a little and to contrast with the still mourning main character who still has a final funeral to go to). We never forget that the flesh being cut into or the eyeball being split apart and its lens removed to be sketched for posterity belonged to a once living person. Because the main character is providing that intangible emotional, memorial aspect (that would normally go ignored in a clinical setting) to complement the visceral reality of the body laying there. The person is more than the sum of their parts but that, and the main character’s slowly returning memories, are changing into something else under the extreme circumstances they have been placed under.

It is perhaps another (the most blunt?) restatement of the conflict between mind and body in Tsukamoto’s work. The way that internal thoughts have the power to affect our dealings with present events, and reshape our dealings with the world. In a way this film begins by feeling like the most grounded in reality of any of Tsukamoto’s films (this time the son is in briefly in the hospital bed rather than an ailing parent), and contains a large cast of characters surrounding and commenting on the central situation but then spins off into strange tangents and encounters with the previous lover in verdant, natural outdoor locations (the beach, which has the most striking scene in the film of the girlfriend doing exhausting abstract modern dance movements against the ocean; the forest clearing to make love in; the road surrounded by tall grasses, disappearing into the distance after the girlfriend has gone. There is perhaps a bit of an environmentalism theme there with these idyllic natural world scenes contrasting with the belching chimney stacks and industrial score in the opening scene. Though those chimneys are recontextualised in the final scene into those of the crematorium), before eventually coming back to some form of grounded reality in the final funeral scene.

It is also strangely, despite his previous work containing sci-fi concepts and over the top pummelling galore, the Tsukamoto film that I often find it the most difficult to suspend my disbelief whilst watching! I am just not sure that someone confronted with their dead previous love on an autopsy table would not just pass that task over to somebody else rather than being desperate to have the task performed by himself alone! Or the hospital itself would not immediately remove him from the body for the good of all involved in the situation! The contrivances pile up quite a bit from that already strange starting point as whilst he gets a few askance looks from his fellow pupils and tutor, and they all seem to know the reasons for his obsessive interest, he is still allowed to continue with the process, as if they understand how cathartic performing his task to completion is for him and how traumatic it would be to step in and stop things part-way through. But then we get the young man’s father knowing about the situation and wanting his son to continue (being proud of his son’s medical achievements) and eventually the father of the girlfriend himself reveals an enormous deus ex machina situation of having arranged with the fatally injured girlfriend to have her body sent for dissection in this particular university so that her autopsy could coincide with the main character having to do it!

I will be curious to hear the Tsukamoto interviews on this one to see whether I am completely off base here, as I don’t think that I could believe in the weight of the contrivances if this film was only trying to be a straight ahead romantic drama. But as a film that starts off plot driven and then almost collapses into a reverie that overwhelms anything else (including that amusingly dark subplot of the other medical student infatuated with our main character and into auto-erotic asphyxiation games who dumps, and even says that she was subsequently responsible for killing by hanging, her professor boyfriend which gets almost completely sidelined about halfway through the film, as all she can do is look on across the autopsy table maybe wondering if anyone will ever treat her with the same detailed mix of brutality and reverence. It is as if the film tries to be In The Realm of the Senses for a moment there, but then really becomes about an obsessive past the point of death relationship rather than just a extremely physical one! This is perhaps the film that entangles the twin Tsukamoto obsessions of the nature of suicidal impulses and grief of those left behind together and lets them fight it out for dominance to see which one wins out!), it is absolutely fascinating.

Whilst in many ways it feels like a more objective film than many of Tsukamoto’s other works (the supporting cast, the more observational approach to the main character that does not seem to be allowing for full identification with his actions, the relatively placid filming style), I think that it may the most subjective of all of them. The way that scenes transition together have a kind of dream-like sense about them even when they are showing low key events such as conversations. Suddenly we are in this place, or now a character has died as we see her picture next to that of her daughter, people are always coming and going imparting a usually strange bit of information that elicits no shocked or surprised response from the other party, and then disappear again. Both fathers turn up in the morgue for a conversation scenes for example (though not always with the main character), which gets treated as normal as the conversations that the main character and his girlfriend have. There the scenery is obviously fantastical but nobody expresses any surprise or wonder at the change of environment, as though they are both already well aware of moving through a waking dream so they can move on from that to just spending time together. I am very much open to everything being filtered through the main character’s perception, not just the obvious scenes.

I wonder if it is a film about the effects of brain damage in that sense. The film starts off brain damaged and then comes to a point of having worked through some issues by the final funeral scene. The main character is able to function after the accident but is forever changed by it, both mentally and physically. Everything, even the dead girlfriend and potential new one, exist subservient to his struggles. The parents are there to guide or provide handy snippets of biographical information at certain promptings. The dissection course is almost there purely to facilitate the main character being able to ‘work through’ his guilt, trauma and grief from the past lost love in a very visceral manner (which ties it in with the short film Haze from the next year, which is also a kind of sublimated relationship drama taken into pure abstraction). That is why whilst I could gripe at being able to suspend disbelief at the entire premise of the film, I am much more open to it ending up becoming more allegorical than a social realist work on future re-watchings!

Either way, that guy is either going to be getting an A* or an F- for his anatomy module! Maybe both simultaneously!

(EDIT: Having watched the Tsukamoto interview on Haze now where he contrasts the brutal beatings and city focus of Tokyo Fist with his attempt to move to the 'fresh, clean air' of the countryside at the end of this film, I am suddenly worried that my sense of being unable to suspend disbelief is more because I could believe that horrible disfiguring beatings could occur in the real world, whilst moments of airy peace and tranqulity are harder to accommodate! And also I know that zedz commented a while back that some interviews on Japanese films are a bit superficial (though never Tsukamoto's!) but I did like Tsukamoto's description of Tadanobu Asano here as being an actor seeming to have "the transparency of a man without memories"! I could see that beautifully poetic description being both an ultimate compliment to an actor whilst also sending them into a crisis of identity at the same time!)

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#34 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Nov 03, 2020 3:41 pm

I will try and get to Kotoko at some point soon (I had the notion of digging out Gemini and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man out of my to watch pile but after a couple of weekends of digging I'm afraid that I never reached them, so I may have to give them up as a lost cause!), but for now here is Tom Mes interviewing Tsukamoto for the BFI's YouTube channel

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#35 Post by nolanoe » Sat Apr 09, 2022 1:41 pm

I have a copy of this and would want to swap it for the UK Box. Anybody in for it?

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#36 Post by Calvin » Sat Apr 09, 2022 6:00 pm

nolanoe wrote:
Sat Apr 09, 2022 1:41 pm
I have a copy of this and would want to swap it for the UK Box. Anybody in for it?
There isn't one, is there? Third Window released most of them individually in the UK.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#37 Post by MichaelB » Sun Apr 10, 2022 5:39 am

It is indeed an exclusively North American release, and for precisely that reason. I didn’t buy it because I already had a fair number of the Third Window discs.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#38 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Apr 10, 2022 7:10 am

Vital is the title from this box that is not available in the UK since it is apparently trapped in rights limbo with the defunct Tartan Video label, who released it on DVD in the UK in the mid 2000s (and is the main reason why I picked the US set up to get the Blu-ray upgrade). If you have the US box the remaining title which Third Window put out that is not included and complements the box is their Blu-ray edition of Tsukamoto's 2014 remake of Fires on the Plain.

Since the release of the box Third Window has released Gemini and Hiruko The Goblin (which I had not realised until recently is based on a story by the writer of The Dark Myth!), but these have complementary editions in the US from the Mondo Macabro label.

(Tetsuo: The Bullet Man and the two Nightmare Detective films have never been released in the UK but did have US DVDs released in the late 2000s which may be OOP by now)

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#39 Post by dwk » Sun Apr 10, 2022 10:42 am

It is possible I missed it, but I don't think the second Nightmare Detective got released on DVD in the US.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#40 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Apr 10, 2022 3:58 pm

You are likely correct in that, as I only remember the first Nightmare Detective coming out on DVD and had just assumed that Dimension Films had released the second.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#41 Post by dwk » Sun Apr 10, 2022 6:38 pm

Looking at IMDB, and, yes, the second Nightmare Detective didn't get any US release.

It appears that The Weinstein Company had both the UK and US rights to the first Nightmare Detective, so it is odd they didn't both releasing a DVD in the UK. It has been 16 years, so I wonder if the corpse of that company (or rather, one of the many companies that picked them apart in various bankruptcies) still has the rights to it or not.

Tetsuo: The Bullet Man is an IFC title in the US and was released on DVD by, I think, MPI before IFC's deal with Scream Factory (who most likely would have released it on Blu-ray.)

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#42 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Feb 16, 2024 4:27 pm

Kotoko
“Shut up…. Thank you so much, I appreciate you coming to talk to me [collapses to floor in heap]”
Well, I know it took three years longer than expected but I finally managed to tackle the next film in the Tsukamoto set, 2011’s Kotoko. This arguably may be Tsukamoto’s most disturbing film. It’s certainly his most challenging and (in)tense one, particularly because of the threat to a child throughout. His most female film too, where the wild handheld camerawork changes from being used to portray male aggression/domination and the horrors of externally imposed physical transformation to expressing female nerviness, loss of moorings and the mental instability that leads to knife-edge wild swings of behaviour. The mania matching well with the constantly unstable handheld camera to create the tension of never knowing if or when Kotoko will lunge out towards the audience, and if it will be a lunge of excitement or uncontrollable violence.

This film reminded me a lot of A Woman Under The Influence (but intensely subjective rather than seen through a bewildered man’s eyes. Though there is a little of that too, at least until the twist!), mixed with the threat to children (or children paying for the sins of their parents) of Skinamarink, with an actress/singer collaboration of the equivalent consequential (and arguably highly irritating if you do not sympathise with their respective character's plights!) stature of Bjork in Dancer In The Dark.

This is a film in three big distinct parts, as we follow Kotoko who is a woman with severe mental issues (including cutting herself: “I’m not doing this to die. I’m just amazed at the body’s will to live”) raising a baby on her own. She also has trouble with constantly seeing ‘doubles’ of people, one of whom is the normal and benign ‘real’ person, and the other a malicious, screamingly ‘in your face’ figure. With her inability to distinguish between the real and illusory person and her violent lashing out in response to their getting in her face leading to her having to constantly move on from place to place after yet another violent attack (which subjectively we see being instigated by others upon her; but objectively is probably her just clubbing that schoolgirl who thought her baby was cute to the ground without provocation!)

Beyond stranger danger though, things get much more upsetting once Kotoko fixates on her baby directly. The first section involves Kotoko being more and more incapable of dealing with her baby, to the extent of putting it into escalatingly dangerous situations. Although Kotoko’s unstable grasp on reality means that the moment of climbing to the top of the apartment building and letting the baby fall from her grasp turns out to have been a delusion. With even the delusion having consequences in reality as the neighbours all heard her screaming and raving during that incident, along with the later meltdown whilst trying to stir fry simultaneously holding the screaming baby close to the wok. That incident – and most importantly the exhaustion of being unable to run anymore from the consequences of violently throwing the red-hot wok through the window that causes the neighbours to come running again (shades of the concerned neighbours ringing the doorbell at the end of A Snake of June!) – leads to baby Daijiro being removed from her for his safety and put into the care of Kotoko’s sister in the countryside.
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The second big chunk of the film is where Kotoko is left on her own. It is rather strange as this section without Daijiro may be the most ‘hopeful’ part of the entire film! (It is certainly the easiest part to re-watch as I am writing this up with the film playing on a loop) Without the figure of the baby to focus on, Kotoko is at first left without a figure to project upon and so the self-harm becomes worse. Yet at least she is not a danger to others any more, only herself. At least until the ‘stalker’ figure of the famous novelist Tanaka appears on the scene, having become obsessed with hearing her randomly singing on the bus ride to her sister’s (an early sign that this is more than meets the eye) and then appearing at her apartment to both propose to her (which Kotoko mockingly rejects with both smoke rings blown into his face and a fork stab to the hand) and who hovers about outside her apartment window afterwards in hope of starting up a relationship, no matter how much it will hurt him to remain in her orbit.

I particularly like this section, as Tanaka gives Kotoko a willingly masochistic figure on which to unleash her violent mental troubles upon: a grown man rather than a random stranger or a defenceless baby. It has aspects of Tsukamoto’s previous films A Snake of June or Tokyo Fist about it, in the sense of the ‘mysterious stranger’ interceding to push a woman, at first unwillingly, into testing her boundaries. But it moves beyond just that idea in such a complicated manner that it leaves so much to consider after it is over. I’ll spoiler tag this part, because it involves a big twist, though one in that re-emphasises the subjective nature of the story over everything else:
SpoilerShow
“I’ve been watching you. Your behaviour worries me.”
I love the way that this ‘usual Tsukamoto figure’ is used in this film. Whilst it is subjectively played as directly happening, now that Kotoko is a solitary figure her mental disturbance seems to have been searching for a figure to focus on. Peppered throughout the film are random television news reports, of a baby murder, a stabbing attack at a school, a CCTV image of a knife killer on the loose, all of which Kotoko quickly shuts off. Which may be a response to a fear of the outside world and her baby being in that position (which will become incredibly explicit in the third section of the film), but may as much be that just hearing about the idea of murder places the idea in her own mind. We meet Tanaka long before we see the news report of him accepting a literary award on the television, but this similarly seems to crystallise the idea of Tanaka in Kotoko’s mind, cemented by going out buying and reading his book (in a lovely montage scene of excitedly gathering drinks and snacks together to go and read uninterrupted on the couch, before consuming everything in one long sitting, ending with Kotoko exhausted with the book perched on top of her head! And inevitably a meeting with Tanaka in the flesh immediately occurs after that sequence) and starting to let him into her world. Albeit with another fork to the hand!

Tanaka is obviously only existing in Kotoko’s mind throughout this section of the film. He’s just an obsessive, doesn’t take no for an answer, persistent suitor that somehow Kotoko needs. To go back to the ‘doubles’ from the first section of the film, Tanaka is the ‘normal’ side of her that allows Kotoko to become entirely ‘malicious’ and violent without it being inflicted on another actual person. The one who will not just allow her to cut herself over and over to see whether she will live or die but is the expression of the side of Kotoko (her ‘will to live’) that wants to bandage her up and see her continue to live. Who wants to take her abuses and violence so that she will not have to inflict them on herself, or on others.

I love that beautiful shot in that second visit to Daijiro at the sister’s house in the country that the two do, where upon reaching the house and seeing the child Tanaka is hidden behind Kotoko, briefly ‘merging into one’ with her. And that is also another sequence underlining that Tanaka is not really there where when the pair, bruised and bandaged, wander up to the house the sister is happy to see both of them despite never having met Tanaka before, to the extent of letting him sleep with baby Daijiro on him! The way that all of the interactions between the pair during this section of the film would look to an objective outsider like an incredibly abusive relationship in which the man is hurting the woman is well observed, especially in the “Everything’s going to be alright!” sequence in which the bloodied and bruised into disfigurement Tanaka sees Kotoko in the process of beginning to have another escalation into a fit of self-loathing violence and begs her to take her self-harm out on him instead and they wrestle and roll around Kotoko’s apartment as she desperately tries to fend off his advances (but to fend off in order to cut herself again).

This is also weirdly the most comic section of the film too! Which may itself be emphasising how this break from the baby is actually helping Kotoko herself. There is that moment of the seemingly drunk old neighbour guy constantly ringing the doorbell until Kotoko pokes her head out of the window (and more about the significance of ‘disembodied body parts’ later) and tells him to go to hell, which takes the form of the old ‘rule of three’ of comedy, of cutting back and forth between them for the three times it takes for the old man to respond to her!

And there is that moment during Kotoko’s second self-cutting straight after Tanaka has bandaged her up the first time that she runs from the apartment with him chasing after her (again, something really suspicious to any outside witness to this action!) only for them to end up on either side of a door, proceeding to accidentally bash the other in the head as they push it open and closed between them! Which is another thing showing that Kotoko and Tanaka are one entity, and Kotoko is just doing all this to herself. Which at least is better than inflicting it on other innocents, and through the process she begins to come to some level of self-acceptance, especially in that central singing-dancing scene for Tanaka in the apartment, which is her breakthrough moment. The lunging, the emotion, the tears are coming from the expressive movement of dance and not through violence. Instead of screaming, there is singing. It is the first moment with Tanaka that does not need him to take blows on her behalf, but instead to be there to simply witness Kotoko’s performance and appreciate it. Immediately following that, Kotoko gets a letter from her sister saying that she will be getting Daijiro back now that she has been found to be ‘rehabilitated’, and on returning excitedly to the apartment to tell Tanaka the news, she at first finds he has moved all of the (emotional) baggage into the nursery room, and then on approaching him, Tanaka disappears from her life.
The ultimate ironic tragedy is this relationship has seemingly hidden Kotoko’s mental disturbance from the outside world again (due to not acting up to anyone besides herself and her
SpoilerShow
imaginary
boyfriend), so all the good work Kotoko has been painstakingly doing to centre herself and come to some degree of self-awareness and self-control is suddenly destroyed by the authorities stepping in once again to arbitrarily declare her to be ‘rehabilitated’ and Daijiro can be returned to her. Which is maybe the most terrifying moment in the entire film, the cold, sinking realisation in the viewer that Kotoko is nowhere near ‘rehabilitated’ at all that almost has one screaming at the screen as she is waiting for the bus to arrive (almost a matching pair with the Woman Under The Influence bus scene) that this is the worst possible thing to do to both mother and child.
_____
And then we get to the third and final section, which is the upsetting and inevitable descent back into violence inflicted upon children again, as Kotoko has Daijiro, now a young boy, returned to her custody and immediately starts fixating upon him again as the focus of her mental troubles.

Which eventually becomes a somewhat upsettingly inevitable escalation of the previous idea of ‘cutting not being a suicidal gesture but a confirmation of whether someone is actually allowed to exist’ into taking on a kind of bizarre quantum superposition of killing being a necessary act in order to prove the continuance of life, as we reach the scene in which Kotoko (after a television-provoked – but which could be self-induced – 'found footage' broadcast of a reporter and then cameraman being shot in some kind of warzone, results in a subsequent nightmare of a gunman shooting her son) murders Daijiro because she does not want him to be left alone and defenceless against the cold brutalities of the outside world (whilst ironically not recognising the extent to which she is the instigator of that self-same brutality: does she need the outside world to inflict cruelties on her to avoid having to take responsibility, and guilt, for what she is doing herself? And that is another reason why Tanaka was so cathartic for her, as he was allowing her to express her sadism guilt-free?).

After she lets Daijiro go “gently and with dignity”, she finds herself in a Purgatory of her own making (beautifully expressed in a sequence Michel Gondry would be proud of, with the walls of the apartment turning into cardboard ones, opening up like an origami crane to show all of her deeds in abstract paper-based child-like forms of fairy lights and string puppets with shattered skulls). And we move to a period some indefinable time later of Kotoko in an asylum, allowed a smoke break in the pouring rain (where Cocco performs an amazing dance routine) and surprisingly receives a visit from her son, now a teenager, who leaves her an origami crane similar to those she made for him as a baby and young boy. He leaves, but not before returning once (as Kotoko once did at the sister’s house) to wave goodbye a second time. Maybe ominously or maybe optimistically suggesting he truly is his mother’s son. Before that great final shot of Kotoko turning and walking away from the window.
____
It is a harrowing film in many ways, but fascinating too in getting as deep into the psychology of a mentally troubled woman as it does. Did Kotoko succeed in murdering Daijiro and the asylum is her version of a Kore-eda style “After Life” purgatory? I like to hope that the asylum scene at the end is an actual place and Daijiro is alive, although obviously some form of the ‘murder’ has to have occurred to have placed Kotoko into the asylum and removed Daijiro from her yet again. But if that is the case her son bears her no ill-will in that scene where they meet.
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But at the same time Daijiro is suspiciously too OK with things, suggesting he is another Tanaka-like figment of the imagination. I suppose we are left in the same position as Kotoko as never knowing the ‘reality’ of the situation!
This may be a supreme example (like A Woman Under The Influence!) of a film that is so harrowing and intense that it is difficult to recommend to anyone as an entertaining watch! I think it will be hard to return to this film very often, not least because the sound of screaming and babies yelling might result in a real life visit from the neighbours if it occurs too much! But it is a very impressive film as well – a musical about mental illness? A story about forgiving oneself and not living with self-hatred? The dangers of an already mentally deranged person being too influenced by the briefest of glimpses of media, one way or the other?

Speaking of that aspect, I want to briefly go back to the Tanaka section, where Kotoko rather dismissively says at first that: “I’d never heard of him because I don’t read. But he was well known among those who read books”. There is a constant voiceover from Kotoko from the beginning to the end of the film, narrating a lot of the events of the film from a detached bystander’s perspective, from the wish to drop the baby off that building through to mocking Tanaka’s come-ons in the second section, and eventually to just pondering where she is and how long she has been there in the third section of the film. In the end Kotoko is kind of the frustrated novelist of this story (especially in that scene on the balcony at night where her character is the most expressive in the entire film, talking excitedly about the limitless boundaries of space to Tanaka, which leads into the singing and dancing performance), and in a way this section of the film really touched me because it is really about the power of the artist to touch someone’s world. Tanaka may not exist as a suitor, but he appears to exist as an actual novelist in the wider world and through reading his work Kotoko feels both less alone and more able to control her violent bouts towards others and herself.

But before that idea has long to settle in as an entirely positive one, in the final section the TV news reports that have been appearing and quickly turned off but not before they give a headline about a school stabbing or a killer on the loose turns into that warzone footage of reporters being shot in an unnamed battlefield somewhere. Compared to the novel by Tanaka which allows for Kotoko’s imagination to merge and somewhat mingle with his to create a complicity, the imagery through the television news bluntly overwhelms with its explicitness. There is no ability to transform that media into something helpful to Kotoko, who instead takes the brutal killings goaded by the on screen imagery and perhaps in fear of them does what she considers to be the lesser of two evils instead. From self-help to helping others, whether they want it or not.
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This is also really thematically consistent with the rest of Tsukamoto’s work. Just jotting down some notes whilst watching I got:

- The surreality and loss of environmental moorings of Vital and Haze, as they work more as interior studies of the mind and blur the line between actual objective reality and total subjectivity. And as in the case of Vital being impossible to view as any kind of 'normal' take on how people would hopefully be allowed to perform autopsies in the 'real world', in Kotoko the sister and social services are not being critiqued at all for their egregious failings here (as they would in a Ken Loach-style version of this story!) because the film is so much about the interior mindset of the main character that any sense of what is really going on in 'reality' to allow for this story to occur is entirely brushed aside (similar to the beautiful way that what Kotoko does in her job is reduced to the single act of underlining words in various documents! With how wobbly the underlining is, as well as the colour of the pencil used to do the underlining, perhaps there as much to act as another expression of Kotoko's mental state than to tell us anything about what, interchangeable, work she is doing)
- Would this have been the mental state of the girlfriend at the opening of Bullet Ballet if she had not committed suicide?
- The Tokyo Fist/A Snake of June idea of a man getting obsessed and invading the life of a woman he barely knows to an eventually unhealthy (to him!) extent
- The couple ‘getting on the same wavelength’ in an at first mutually destructive but eventually kind of helpful in surviving fashion of Haze
- I was particularly reminded of Tetsuo II in the child running up the steps to the rooftop whilst a parent impotently tries to chase after and save them. Only for the parents to be the ones who turn out to be the real threat in the situation. (Plus – you know – the ultra-gory moment of bullet exploding child’s head which perhaps calls back both to the rooftop scene as well as the child returning the favour by destroying their father’s head in the sepia-toned flashback, both also from Tetsuo II)
- The desperate repeated mantra of “Everything will be fine!” by Tanaka as he and Kotoko wrestle around the apartment feels like a very pointed call back to the “Moshi Moshi?” scene in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, which is the other extreme of language used as an emotionless, dispassionate take on a repeated phrase between two people, repeated until it loses meaning.

I did like the ‘doubles’ idea too, with the appearance of two versions of the same person being a sign of one of the violent explosions being about to occur (especially terrifying when there are two Daijiros playing simultaneously in the living room, just before the colouring pencil goes ‘accidentally’ into the eye). As mentioned above I like that the relationship between Tanaka and Kotoko goes in that ‘doubling’ direction too, with one taking on the ‘normal’ qualities and the other the ‘malicious’ ones. But potentially overlooked is the relationship Kotoko has with her sister too, as the ‘normal’ version (able to look after Daijiro as a baby. Plus the sister has a husband and two teenage sons), whilst Kotoko is the dangerously unhinged single mother in name only, or rather too intensely a mother to a destructive extent.

I also really liked that motif of ‘disembodied limbs’ that occurs throughout the film. I am not entirely sure what it means but it adds to that scary intensity of never really knowing where the next body part will appear from. Kotoko leaving the sister’s house before waiting around the corner before sticking an arm back out (the arm that she cuts to ribbons in self-hatred) is both a gesture that touchingly shows how she is unable to just leave in one swift movement, but also could be something straight out of a Grudge or Ring style horror antagonist too. So you think you’re done with me? I’m back and will never leave you, popping up at the moments you least expect. It is perhaps not an accident that the final gesture of the film is the son that Kotoko thought she had killed waving goodbye and then popping back from behind a tree to wave an arm at Kotoko again, to which she can only respond from her window with a raised hand. But at least that hand raised in a semi-wave is some sort of acknowledgement of another separate, though connected, being.

And there is also that hung moment of anticipation in that scene of leaving the sister’s house, where whilst a couple of other members of the family go inside after Kotoko has turned the corner, the young boy Daijiro is waiting there expectantly, as if knowing that something further is going to happen. Then Kotoko’s arm pops out from behind the tree which proves the anticipation was correct. Which is a scene which I have a suspicion is meant to pair with the figure with the gun about to shoot Daijiro whilst Kotoko lies on the floor powerless to stop the bullet being fired, and we again get that held moment of anticipation that the thing that shouldn’t happen (should never happen) is coming head on and there is no escape from it. And then it does, because it has been willed into existence as the only logical end result of the train of thought that led to the mysterious gunman suddenly being there in the first place.

In that sense the whole film is nervy and on edge, waiting for that arm to pop out from behind the bush or tree, the foreknowledge of somehow knowing that it will inevitably happen becoming the paralysed anticipation of waiting for the trigger to get pulled.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Feb 19, 2024 2:18 pm, edited 8 times in total.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#43 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Feb 16, 2024 8:01 pm

Continuing with Kotoko for a moment, listening to the Tom Mes commentary there were a couple of aspects that I particularly liked: Mes picks up on the growing theme of ‘critique of war’ in Tsukamoto’s films, placing the turn at Tetsuo: The Bullet Man in 2009, when the person becomes a ‘human weapon’ and then going into explicit war narratives of Fires on the Plain and Killing. But he also notes that Kotoko acts like this as well, with its final act broadcast from the warzone leading to trauma and loss back home (Mes well observes that the nightmare of the boy being shot is very similar to the nightmare sequence in American Werewolf In London), that is amusingly signed off with a Shinzo Abe-esque politician with a raised fist saying direct to camera “Hang tough, Japan!”, which was the slogan used to affirm national unity post the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima meltdown (the real life events were in March of that year, with Kotoko getting its Japanese cinema release in November, so this was really current reference).

(That’s another reason why even if the film got shown on television that sequence would probably be unbroadcastable now - in addition to having the most shocking head explosion since Scanners - as since the film Abe has of course been assassinated himself in a very improvised weapon fashion. Although the cutting scenes and general intensity – as well as the somewhat taboo theme of female mental illness being something that isn’t caused by men, and may be as a result of being a willingly single mother, without a father to bring balance to the family – might also preclude that!)

Mes also brings up Repulsion, which is a really great reference. And whilst Mes does not make the connection, for me that ties in with the ‘disembodied body parts, especially hands, popping out of walls’ motif that features in both films.

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Re: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

#44 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Feb 24, 2024 8:41 pm

Killing

...and the ‘disembodied body parts’ motif returns strongly in 2018’s Killing. Partly all those chopped off during the bloody fight scene in the middle of the film, but in particular in that sequence of peasant woman Yu approaching the outside of young samurai Mokunoshin’s hut and after he reaches his fingers through the gaps in the wood, sucking on them before he withdraws. Only for him to return his whole arm this time and mutually caress/choke Yu, which is perhaps literalising the ‘could go either way’ dangerous nature of this roaming samurai.
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After the opening sequence showing a sword being forged in a blazing furnace (very similar to the opening titles of the Tetsuo films), the film begins with the younger samurai Mokunoshin teaching the young peasant farmer Ichisuke how to fight. The actual samurai is skilled in the art of fighting compared to the enthusiastic and vigorous, but wildly thrashing around during the fighting and always getting defeated, farmer with ambitions of escaping his circumstances (which I wonder is an allusion to the Mifune character in Seven Samurai. And I have a suspicion that the whole film is subverting the ‘mythologising’ nature of that film towards the figure of the samurai). Mokunoshin makes plans to leave, apologising to the father of the family that he is staying with for leaving before he would be able to help with the upcoming harvest, but the father says to leave with his blessing, saying that he has done more than enough for them already. Although his plans to leave do not go down quite as well with the daughter of the family, Yu, who has a pining crush on Mokunoshin.

Two outside forces come into the area that upsets the entire balance of the story. The first is that some bandits appear on the outskirts of the little village, that causes the peasants to panic and beg for Mokunoshin to run them off. However on going to meet the band of ruffians, it turns out that Mokunoshin gets on quite well with them (perhaps because as Tom Mes commentary points out, these ‘bandits’ are similar roaming masterless samurai themselves, so of the same social group as Mokunoshin, just without a purpose) and gets them to leave the villagers alone.

The second is when Ichisuke interrupts Yu’s riverbank attempted declaration of love to pull Mokunoshin off to witness a duel taking place between two other samurai. Which whilst Ichisuke is taken by the sight of the face-off, Mokunoshin abruptly turns and leaves as soon as the first blow is stuck, which for him has decided the entire fight so he (and the audience) do not need to see the actual death blow being struck (which ties in with the final scenes of the film). Then whilst training with the re-enthused Ichisuke, the winner of the duel appears, introduces himself as Sawamura and makes a proposal to recruit the both of them to come to Kyoto with him for a dreadfully important mission. He leaves to see if he can recruit more people in the area but says he will return in the next few days, and to be ready to leave immediately at that point.
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I like that even though he is introduced as the ‘older wise mentor’ type, that Sawamura is immediately a rather flawed character. Instead of witnessing a duel from the sidelines and then recruiting the winner, as with the Takashi Shimura character in Seven Samurai, here the older man himself is the one involved in the duel to the death (which presumably unfortunately removes another potential recruit from the picture!) and it is the younger men with no agendas who are in the watching audience, and have no particularly vested interest in the outcome.

That is followed by the farmer-trying-to-be-samurai Ichisuke either being wrongly assumed by Sawamura to be an actual samurai rather than a peasant (which suggests a lapse in judgement, perhaps). Or maybe it is because Sawamura is desperate for any men he can find for his final last ditch attempt to turn the tide in the wider civil war, so his standards have lowered. Or maybe it is just that Sawamura was so enamoured by wanting Mokunoshin to join him that Ichisuke got caught up in the gravitational pull of the invitation as well? I like that we do not get to find out definitively either way.

And the other flaw of Sawamura evident in that first scene is his leaving them to prepare for a couple of days before he returns for them. That may have been the fatal mistake of the film, to allow the time for reflection rather than immediately going there and then. Because that allows the time for the next events to happen…
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I think that the major theme of this film may be one of ‘outstaying your welcome’. We see Mokunoshin talking to the father of the family in the early scene about making plans to leave soon and they have a really nice scene of saying goodbye. However Mokunoshin does not leave at that point. After he deals with the bandits and comes back to the family he again says that he is sorry that he will have to leave, and the father thanks him again and that he has done enough for them. But Mokunoshin still hangs around a while longer, maybe to keep watch for the bandits until they move on, or maybe because he has a crush on Yu himself which keeps him there.

Then when Sawamura says that he will be back for both Mokunoshin and Ichisuke, that leads to upheaval in the family, as the parents naturally do not want to lose their son in a pointless war. The parents and Yu start to become disenchanted with Mokunoshin around that time, because he will now both be leaving as well as taking their brother too, so it will just be women and old men left on the farm.

Then we get to the catalyst event that arguably causes all the tit-for-tat cascade of horror for the rest of the film, as just as Mokunoshin is about to leave, he collapses into a faint and therefore the desperately urgent mission to Kyoto has to be postponed until he recovers. Whether this is illness or cowardice on Mokunoshin’s part is left interestingly ambiguous. Either way the frustrated at being prevented from leaving at the last moment Ichisuke runs off into the woods around the farm and straight into the bandits. Who tease him for pretentions of being a samurai when he is just a lowly farmer, until they get into a fight.

The tit-for-tat escalates further as Ichisuke returns home beaten up and Sawayama decides that because he had designated Ichisuke as a samurai that he now has to defend the beaten farmer’s honour… and bloodily kills many of the bandits. The bandits then retaliate by invading the farm and killing Ichisuke and the father and mother. Sawayama then forces Mokunoshin into having to avenge the killings by taking him to the bandit's lair. Only Mokunoshin fails to take the bandits out and has to watch on as Yu, who followed to ensure that her family would be avenged, is raped before Sawayama arrives on the scene to kill all of the bandits once and for all.

… and that really all seems to have stemmed from not leaving when you said that you would! Although as with all tit-for-tat conflicts (and beautifully portrayed here) there is that sense that every character would have had a different ‘start point’ for the conflict that would place the blame on different parties in the situation. I get the impression that Sawayama would feel that the bandits were the villains and it was entirely their fault that he was forced to have to step in and kill them, on two separate occasions. Yu might feel that Mokunoshin not being there during the attack on the farm to defend her family was the ultimate betrayal. There could be a case made that the impetuous Ichisuke caused it all by pretending to be a samurai and antagonising the bandits.

But really the film suggests that Mokunoshin may be to blame simply for being a samurai lodging with peasants and LARP-ing as a farmer, much as Ichisuke was trying to roleplay (or transition) in the other direction (which makes me think of the two characters crossing paths in Bullet Ballet – one from being an ad executive into the gang world; and the other attempting to go the other way, with similarly deadly lack of success). Mokunoshin may present initially as a charismatic samurai figure but he, as with Sawamura, shows fundamental weaknesses at certain key points, and maybe damningly even a cowardice towards actual combat rather than just doing training routines. The interactions with Yu (including the furtive masturbation scenes) also suggest at the very least an ambivalence towards leaving, even though he seems to realise that there is no future for him there.

As much as the 'outstaying your welcome' theme, that idea of being constrained within the social class you have been defined into by your circumstances, and no possibility of 'transitioning' however much you want to, or how suited you may be (or feel you should be) to another lifestyle, is another big one. Mokunoshin is the samurai who seems to find the idea of direct violence abhorrent, and seems to wish to be a peasant; Ichisuke is the peasant farmer who dreams of being a samurai, but never will be; Yu is infatuated with someone always destined to leave, and eventually perhaps wishes he had earlier! The bandits are particularly interesting for this where, as Tom Mes' commentary notes, no matter how low they have fallen, they are still members of that warrior class, just masterless criminals now. Mokunoshin offers them the possibility of maybe helping the farming family out after he leaves as they will appreciate the help (so taking over his ersatz farmer role), but they seem ambivalent at best towards doing so. And that ambivalence of whether they are there to take over a helpful role, or just to plunder the defenceless farm once Mokunoshin leaves is perhaps why they are still hanging around the area themselves for Ichisuke to end up running into, at which point the flimsy, elusive (or illusory) opportunity of the possibility of being something different collapses again into everyone getting pulled back to their roles in the 'natural order' of things. This idea may even be referenced in the opening of the sword being forged by the artisan, with the close up of the rhythmic blows on the red hot metal cutting straight to a similar close up of the finished sword in the quivering hands of a samurai, as if it is a shot-countershot of mutual interest and fantasies about how the other side live, and which may be the best example of how two sides work in symbiosis together, whilst the rest of the film is about both sides not realising how interdependent their relationship is with other groups of people, and through wanting to jump across an impossible divide only ending up mutually destroying each other.
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The film has been literally getting darker and darker as events have become more dire, going from broad daylight in the opening scenes, through to the darkly lit bandit cave and the scene of carnage in the farmhouse lit by flames. Then we get to the final section of the film that goes impressively abstract, as Mokunoshin cowardly runs away into the forest, pursued both by Sawamura and Yu and the film goes almost pitch black. All of the discussion of important missions to Kyoto or protecting the farm from bandits is behind the characters now, and it boils down to the older man pursuing the younger one in a personal, obsessive, conflict between them. The woman watching on, unable to save either of them, and in some ways not entirely caring herself anymore over which one lives or dies in the final duel, since they both fundamentally failed her. And in that final duel, the era of the samurai comes to an end, as the older man with ragged (and maybe always illusory) principles that were not fit for purpose any more dies at the hands of the younger, more pragmatic (but less noble) man.
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A fascinating film - I would be really curious how fans or critics of the samurai film in general reacted to this film, because as with Vital and Kotoko, this film begins somewhat ‘grounded’ (almost generically so) and then does an insistent, inexorable turn into something extremely internal and subjective, where the concerns of the outside world fall away as an irrelevance and it becomes about interpersonal relationships, and beyond that to people trapped within the boundaries of their own worldviews and thought processes. In some ways that makes this film a wonderful bookend to Tetsuo’s original ‘metal fetishists’, as it is about men enamoured more with their weapons and plunging them into each other whilst the woman is turned into the third wheel in the situation, left as a kind of outside witness to an inevitable suicide pact, as the only person who understands why they reached that mutually destructive end.

As with many a Tsukamoto film, it is also a kind of generational fracture, where the younger men cannot attain the nebulous (and maybe deluded) standards of the older. Or conversely where the older generation have become so inured to killing that they can only conceive of the next fight. Or to the onlooking woman between them how the men are playing out a personal conflict which doesn’t help her achieve the vengeance she wants in the ‘real’ world. Yes, its another three-way structure involving two men and a woman very similar to Tokyo Fist or A Snake of June. Except here the question of who our sympathies may particularly lie with of the three is much more open to debate.

This is a fascinating deconstruction of the ‘myth of the samurai’ with perhaps a comment on the whole idea of how the whole samurai code of ethics came to an end. It struck me whilst viewing as very much as an ‘end of an era’ story (and not knowing too much about the historical period it was exciting to have that sense confirmed by Tom Mes’s commentary that the film is set in the 1850s, coming to the end of the isolationist period of the Tokugawa shogunate): we enter the story at the point where a young samurai, Mokunoshin, who has been lodging in a peasant village and helping with the crops has made a decision to move on; and later the older samurai Sawamura who comes to village decides to recruit both the younger samurai and one of the villagers to go to fight in the civil war in Kyoto. In both of those cases there is a desire to leave the small village for something more (most obviously shown in the enthusiastic young peasant wanting to become a samurai), or to go and fight for a grander purpose. But in both cases the urgency of leaving is somewhat thwarted. It is the end of an era not because the samurais in this tale went to fight and die nobly on the battlefield; but because circumstances conspired to tear them apart before they were even able to set out on their journey. That irony of maybe the entire grand arc of national history hinging on a conflict in a small village farm somewhere hangs heavy across this film – the idea that maybe the presence of these particular samurai could have helped to turn the tide of the wider civil war in some glorious battle, but instead of teaming up they ended up turning on and killing each other in an anonymous field somewhere.

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