This. This is
where Shinya Tsukamoto came into his own. If Tetsuo was about
learning his craft, and Tetsuo II about teaching himself the
fundamentals of storytelling, Tokyo Fist was about fully exploring
the humanity of his characters. Setting aside Hiruko the Goblin,
that's only three feature films. That's a tight learning curve.
Tsuda (Shinya
Tsukamoto) is an insurance salesman. He is harried by the pressures
of his job, not really happy but highly comfortable with a nice
apartment and a live-in girlfriend Hizuru (Kaori Fuji) he takes for
granted. It's a plug-&-play life. Everything fits, no reason to
screw with it. Hizuru is content to make half-hearted attempts at
arousing Tsuda's erotic interest which doesn't extend much further
than buying her virginal white dresses that fit little better than
sacks. He advises her that all men are wolves and orders her to
avoid them.
On his walk spots
a dead animal in an alley, decaying. When he passes that way again
later it has been removed. It had been a sign of life (and the messy
vitality of it), and now it's forgotten, no trace left or tolerated
by society. This is Tsuda's world...sterile by collusion..
A chance encounter
reunites Tsuda with his best friend from school, Kojima (Koji
Tsukamoto, the director's brother), an aspiring boxer. Kojima is all
smiles but plans to dismantle Tsuda's life and psyche.
With his first few
films, Tsukamoto had established a pattern: a male protagonist,
imperfect but our point of identification; a male antagonist, the
catalyst that transforms our hero in some way but not much more; the
woman caught between them who will be important to the hero but
story-wise a passive element . Tokyo Fist turns the formula on its
head.
I'll warn you now,
there are spoilers ahead. I can't discuss the movie without them,
and I really want to. Sorry.
In their youths
Tsuda and Kojima burned with inner fire, a blaze that Kojima has
carefully tended and stoked all these years. Seeing that Tsuda
hasn't done the same enrages Kojima and gives his animal rage a new
focus. His psychological assault on his old friend begins by
convincing Tsuda that Kojima and Hizuru are having an affair.
Oblivious to
Hizuru's faithfulness to him, Tsuda devolves before her, consumed by
jealousy and impotent rage until finally she sees him attack and be
beaten by Kojima. It's a powerful sight, her Tsuda whimpering and
Kojima preening like a bestial thing unleashed. It breaks some leash
in her psyche, and soon she has ditched the white sack for a tight
red dress, shorn her hair to near-punk shortness, and starts
exploring body modifications like piercings, weights in her skin, and
tattoos (something respectable Japanese society finds abhorrent).
She's not a masochist – the physical pain is an adrenaline rush.
She moves out of the apartment she and Tsuda have shared.
Kojima hasn't
stolen her, Tsuda has driven her away by his very possessiveness and
distrust. Thanks to Kojima, Tsuda has found once more the spark of
life within himself. However, he doesn't know what to do with it –
he's lost his girlfriend, he neglects his job, fails to pay his
rent...he cannot focus on his own life, consumed as he is with Kojima
and Hizuru.
Here the formula
is starting to break down already, as our presumed protagonist Tsuda
devolves not only in Hizuru's estimation but in our own. Simply put,
it becomes hard to root for the guy before the first act closes, and
for a moment Hizuru looks to replace him. On the other hand, she
turns such a chill toward him that she too is hard to feel any
sympathy for. Tsukamoto is doing a boxer's dance around the points of
the triangle with audience sympathy.
Kojima also loses
his inward focus, obsessed first with destroying Tsuda and then
puzzling over Hizuru who refuses to be the conquest he had assumed.
Unwittingly, his unmanning of Tsuda has freed Hizuru, and he utterly
fails to recognize that he has sparked her own inner life force.
When she begins to explore it, it has the ironic effect of unmanning
Kojima himself. He is incapable of accepting her true self, he is
repelled and afraid when her true self emerges even though it's he
that unleashed her. This shakes his self-assurance and his vision,
and threatens to undo him when he is asked to face off in the ring
with a boxer who left his last opponent dead.
That's Tsukamoto
evolving again: his catalyst (Kojima) has now himself become
catalyzed, and the passive female third point for the first time in
any of the director's films has become a potent agent of change that
overwhelms both men. While Tsuda and Kojima obsess over each other,
Hizuru turns her gaze inward to understand what is going on in her
own soul. Both men have failed her. She had moved in with Kojima to
better understand her self.
Thus, Hizuru is
the first to find her way...but not without the help of Tsuda, who
begins to master his own fire abd by doing so comes to recognize
hers. And here's the big spoiler as far as I'm concerned, and the
thing that won me over. Kojima, who opened Hizuru to her true self,
is too little a man to deal with her, it is ultimately Tsuda (the man
who loves her) that accepts Hizuru's true self and vindicates her
at-times confused and alarmed journey of self-realization.
Meanwhile Kojima
has become at last a fully realized character in his own right. Our
sympathies now lie fully with all three. Previously, Tsukamoto has
been a stylist whose humanism has been only glimpsed within clever
filmmaking. With Tokyo Fist he has given it full voice.
One thing remains
the same, the director maintains his visual signature though
expanding his color palette. The handheld camera work, the bursts
of frenetic energy, the heavy blue and amber filters and lighting are
all present as is the punk score by collaborator Chu Ishikawa. More
natural colors are allowed in, and Tsukamoto further refines his
vision of Tokyo as an inescapable prison of towering smooth and
sterile blocks into a thing of poetry more home to science fiction.
The only thing of nature its denizens ever see is the occasional
small patch of sky far beyond reach, visible in small windows framed
by the overwhelming architecture.
Pay attention to
the one shot where lush foliage is seen, and try to tell me you
weren't moved by it.
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