Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2009)

Spoilers follow.

What many fans of 1989's Tetsuo: The iron Man may not know is that it was a refinement of an earlier version of the same story. Allow me to place emphasis on 'refinement', because that's precisely what it was – an expansion and further explication of a rather incoherent and meaningless experiment in no-budget filmcraft. The reason I stress this is because there have since been two more Tetsuo films from Shinya Tsukamoto, and both of them have had a lukewarm reception at best from fans who feel that elaborating on the first feature has robbed it of it's essence...moved it from raw anarchic howl toward more conventional cinema. And they're right, it has, but it's only fair to the director to realize that he was already well along on that trajectory back in 1989. Just sayin'.

The son of businessman Anthony (Eric Bossick) is deliberately murdered right before Anthony's eyes. His wife Yuriko (Akiko Monô ) aches for revenge, but to her disgust Anthony cannot bring any kind of emotional reaction to the surface. That is, not until his body begins to morph into a metal instrument of pure rage. The killer comes after them both, leading Anthony to revelations about himself, his parents, and his father's research into recreating the human body through robotics.

In many ways this fourth Tetsuo (third feature film) is a throwback to a part of Tsukamoto's career that he was already finished with and left behind. Specifically it is a remake of sorts of Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, and it had no more creative impetus than the notion of making a Tetsuo film in America. and having the antihero fly. When it came down to it, neither of those made it into the film, except that the salaryman role played before by Tomoro Taguchi was replaced by Bossick, an American Taguchi lookalike. For many it was too little too late. However, I would like to suggest that this Tetsuo could not have been made at any other time in Tsukamoto's career. Where he takes it to is a complete refutation of the earlier films, honoring the spiritual journey his body of work had led him on.

Tsukamoto and co-writer Hisakatsu Kuroki (who co-scripted the Nightmare Detective movies) have pared the story down to the most simplistic possible characterizations and plot resulting in a brisk comic-book (or manga) film (fittingly, Anthony transforms through a number of stages, first looking every bit like a character from Marvel then like a metallic John Merrick – a face that might have inspired the look of The Scarecrow from Nolan's Batman Begin.). At only seventy minutes, it almost feels more of a sketch. Even the performances are lasered in on the moment like comic-book peoples, unnaturally flat or eschewing nuances they are dictated not by normal human responses but by the style of the film. Aesthetically, Bullet Man recreates the chaotic, micro-budget look of the first Tetsuo feature but with a very calculated, high-budget approach: not black and white but digitally desaturated: not grainy, grimy 16mm but crystalline HD. Again, YMMV – I found it exhilarating to see a Tetsuo flick that looks this good, not to mention hearing Chu Ishikawa's original themes again.

What's not readily apparent is the heart of the film. The earlier films – in fact, nearly all of the directors works until recently – had struggled with the conflict between the natural body and an aggressively artificial environment However, Tsukamoto had already succeeded in resolving that conflict, exorcised the demon, and moved on. There was no need to revisit it, and it is not revisited in Bullet Man. The story built around that theme remains, but the theme itself is no longer present as a driving force. 

On the other hand, Bullet Man has a few links to his more recent works. Echoing Vital, a flashback to Anthony's dying mother sees her requesting that her husband dissect her body, study every bit of her and recreate her physically, a request born of a concern for the peace of her continuing spiritual presence. This part of the story is the weakest, and I believe it of less importance thematically than simply owing to the conventional need to flesh out a quick plot. More substance can probably be found in a visual motif Tsukamoto has lately begin using in all his films, that of colorful microscopic footage and renderings of the human body's internal workings. As meticulous as Tsukamoto is with his metaphorical imagery, I'm sure it's not coincidental that the most colorful sequence in the movie has the killer/instigator stand before a gray wall on which a projector is shuffling slides of the human body in medical renderings, brightly colored and superimposed over himself. What it might mean, though, I have to confess goes right over my head. There is also a direct if obvious re-iteration from Nightmare Detective 2 that anger, hate, a refusal to forgive mutates the soul and effectively kills the self.

I'm not convinced that Tetsuo: the Bullet Man is actually exploring anything. That, I think, is what keeps the movie a slight work, neither Tsukamoto nor his characters are striving for meaning and so neither are we the audience asked to do any heavy lifting. Rather than working out a question, Bullet Man stands as a statement of principles from the director, gleaned over a lifetime of exploring his most personal concerns. It plays like a coda to his work thus far, the capping of an era. Iron Man and Body Hammer at the beginning of his professional career embraced an apocalyptic vision. Bullet Man walks us right up to that very same door of annihilation...and then says 'no' and resolutely closes the door. That's not a place Tsukamoto had reached before Nightmare Detective 2. 

Over the body of his work Shinya Tsukamoto has crafted tales of personal metamorphosis. Through his filmic explorations, it is Tsukamoto himself who has transformed.

Nightmare Detective 2 (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2008)

Kagenuma, the reluctant psychic of Nightmare Detective, has not found peace. His dreams are filled with the heartbreaking memories of his mother, a woman with an extreme social anxiety disorder. When Kagenuma innocently revealed his ability to read minds by asking her about her crippling fear of the world, it gave her a new one: that she was exposed to everyone, humiliated. She tried to murder her child, then she hanged herself.

It isn't just bad memories and dreams that come to him. As a child, was was terrorized by ghosts that visited him in the night or marched outside in the street. His father saw them too.

Now he spends his days shut up in his hotel room, surrounded by the children of families living there. They are fond of him, and are probably the only people he can stand to b around: bright, full of happiness, not filling his mind with adult disillusion and anger. Still, he'd rather be alone. The last thing he wants is to be called upon for his services as a psychic. 

That's when teenaged Yukie shows up. She and her schoolgirl clique pranked Yuko Kikugawa, an unloved student who has now shut herself off from the world but is appearing in their dreams. Yukie senses a threat, and she's right – soon they begin dying.

“Apologize to her”, that's Kagenuma's advice when he turns Yukie away.

Naturally he doesn't stay uninvolved for long, or we'd have no movie. When he does agree to enter Yukie's dreams, it isn't sympathy that motivates him. He sees in Yuko the same crippling terror that drove his mother mad, and he badly wants to understand. What did his mother see? Was he, her child, a monster in her eyes? What kind of fear makes someone you love unreachable?

This second film in a still unfinished trilogy about Kagenuma feels like a nexus for the character and for writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto as well. For more than half his career he has sought a reconciliation of the body with its environment. with a measure of empathy and compassion, and with a measure of optimism. Having finally achieved that his quest has moved inward to the troubled soul, and I'm finding his stories (Vital, Haze, Nightmare detective) far more tempered in their optimism. The first film featuring Kagenuma ended with nothing more spirited than a temporary respite from hopelessness for the title character.

That film was saddled with a routine police procedural plot that hindered the movie from feeling like a personal work. This time the film takes the visuals and plot logic of a Japanese ghost story, though the specter is that of a girl still living. Rather than being forced into a formula, that frees Tsukamoto to spend quality time with his characters, and to let them discover common ties (spoilers ahead)

Yukie has not been the nicest person toward her classmates, and she's fully aware of it, but then she hasn't had the happiest home life either with a mother who makes no effort to connect with her. At school she has surrounded herself with friends who are similarly uncaring of others. Yukie's insistence on reaching out to Yuko, the girl they hurt together, is alien to their nature and we gather new to Yukie herself.

Examining Yuko's bedroom, Kagenuma finds artwork she has done: dark, crowded, anxious but also among the works are pages radiating color and wonder, brightness. Happiness. If Yuko has joy in her, perhaps Kagenuma's mother did as well? In the very next scene we see Kagenuma as we've never seen him before: happily playing at games with the children of his apartment. Something in himself has been freed by the discovery. Note that Kagenuma can hear the inner thoughts of the girl's father wishing this stranger would leave his house, but importantly not until after he finds the happier artwork.

The film's coda is a sequence in which Kagenuma of hos own accord helps a child by ascending into the child's anxiety dream only to discover that the child is himself. His child self sleeps fitfully, sharing a futon with his older brother while his parents seem to find enjoyment in his suffering. It's an uncomfortable moment: on the one had, his mother is happy and laughing, and his father shares a moment of binding with her uncommon to Kagenuma's understanding of them; on the other, it's beyond him what they find delightful about their child's anxieties. It is, after all, only a dream, but one that plays on the cognizance gap between children and adults. Meanwhile, we've just learned a new detail about Kagenuma, that he has an older brother. It means nothing to the story proper, but it means something to viewers who know that Tsukamoto himself had an older brother and a troubled relationship with his own parents.

The key to setting them all free is empathy – Yukie, Yuko, Kagenuma, the troubled memory of his mother (or perhaps literally her spirit, after the ambiguous Vital, as the ghosts indicate), and maybe even setting free the director himself. Empathy comes with a price, openness to the unwanted pain of other people that warps their inner essences.  Yuko is caught in the middle. We see her and some of the figures in her art as having one eye shut and the other open too widely.  Yukie alone of her clique learns empathy, and it will forever alter her perceptions. The alternate course is to; hurt people in order to shut down one's ability to feel, which is tantamount to killing one's self (as Kagenuma's mother and Yukie's friends). Through empathy, Nightmare Detective 2 finds something more valuable than solace. The movie finds forgiveness, and through forgiveness catharsis.

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2006)

Police investigate two cases, a young woman who has stabbed herself to death and a married man who has done the same. To Detective Sekiya the verdict is clear: suicide. Detective Kirishima isn't so sure. Shortly before their deaths both had called someone named '0'. The dead man's wife says that he was screaming for help in his sleep even as his arm, puppetlike, plunged a boxcutter at himself. The police chief decides that a psychic should be brought in to help locate '0'.

That psychic is Kagenuma, with the ability to enter other people's dreams. Kagenuma has never had a happy life. His mother feared and rejected him for his psychic gift. When he uses it, he sees nothing but other people's pain, their miseries, the darkest forgotten secrets that misshape their psyches. They come to him begging for his help, then resent him for what comes of it after he has endured their nightmares. Kagenuma would like for himself nothing better than oblivion and an escape from the company of others. 

Writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto has explored a number of disparate ideas over the course of his career, and now with his ninth feature release he draws most of them together in one film. Alienation and the deadening of the spirit have been a constant theme throughout his oeuvre, and suicide particular to Bullet Ballet and Vital (Vital especially explored the idea of suicide pacts). In recent films Tsukamoto's gaze had turned from the body itself to the inner essence (Vital, Haze). Suppression of memory to blot out pain was key to Vital and Haze both. ESP and the idea of shared psychic space between people (that is, people visiting each other's subconscious minds) appeared in Tetsuo: the Iron Man and resurfaced in Vital.

Tsukamoto himself plays '0', a more or less direct continuation of the morphing antagonist of Tetsuo and Tetsuo II, the man who has gone from seeking the destruction of his self to a perverse joy in the destruction of everyone and everything around him. '0' also is the more malevolent reflection of the instigator he played in A Snake of June.

Tsukamoto's films have a history of showcasing strong female characters. Those sensibilities are again put forward in Keiko Kirishima, the detective who presses Kagenuma to get involved in the case. She is new to the force, having been stationed a desk job with the police before now. Seeing her first dead bodies she has a hard time with the bloody aftermath. In a Tsukamoto film, squeamishness is a device like glasses were for Hitchcock: in the master's movies the wearing of glasses signified faulty moral vision. For tsukamoto, an inability to deal with blood, decay, etc. means a character who is not fully in touch with nature and often blind to something important in the story. Kirishima says that she asked for a transfer because she wants to do work that is more substantial, but we will learn later that it is more likely that an inner drive is seeking closer proximity with violence and death. Privately, Kirishima has been having her own series of nightmares in which she meets a wilder version of herself. 

All of this echoes the female protagonists of Tokyo Fist (Hizuru discovers her inner fury), A Snake of June (Rinko hides her true essence from herself), and Bullet Ballet (Chisato lives on the edge in search of self-destruction). And that brings us to the major problem with Nightmare Detective: Kirishima, not Kagenuma, is the central character here but she does not live up to Tsukamoto's heroines of his past efforts. Those characters were more fully developed and played by vibrant actresses. We've seen the likes before. The female cop who has to work harder than everyone else to prove herself equal to the men. Sad to say it's true to life, so the problem isn;t one of credibility. Unfortunately it's overly familiar – a cliché. Coming from a director renowned for his wild imagination establishes the movie on a disconcerting note. Compounding the problem, Ysukamoto has cast pop singer Hitomi in the lead, a decent actress of limited experience and without the range of his previous lead actresses. Kirishima doesn't resonate like Rinko, Hizumi, or Chisato.

I blame the premise of the movie. In tying together so much of his past work in one movie, this should be the Tsukamoto film to end them all, his crowning achievement. It is a good film, yet in sum it ends up one of his slighter works even as he brings his disparate strands together in one uniform piece. Weakening the piece substantially, these themes don't make themselves plain until late in the movie. In order to bring the audience to that point, Tsukamoto must take pains to build and support his premise. That takes the form of a standard police procedural, nothing like the fresh original storytelling the director is known for. We've seen criminal investigation movies of this flavor before, and coming from Tsukamoto it feels impersonal and uninspired. Nightmare Detective takes patience and probably multiple viewings before you see the real Tsukamoto in it. I didn't until I watched and reviewed his films in chronological order.

You can catch some sense of the director in the camera movements, like the nervous handheld shots. Here too, though, Tsukamoto departs from his usual tendencies. While he's still experimenting, true to his nature, this time his use of colors employs not gels and filters but digital manipulation with color timing and desaturation. Tokyo no longer seems a cold, sterile place to live, just another urban center with an alluring night presence. Chu Ishikawa tones it down as well, where an emotional montage is informed not by the director’s favored composer but by Erik Satie's Gymnopaedia.

I've always been fascinated by dreams and the dream experience, and the difficulty in recreating that experience on screen. Most directors fail – hell, most don't even try. I suspect they have never spent a moment recalling their own dreams, falling back on popular misconceptions (fill the screen with extravagant visuals, et voila). Have you ever noticed how in dreams you often know intuitively what a thing, person, or creature looks like even though you never actually see them? How would you convey that in a movie without heavy expositive dialog? In Nightmare Detective Tsukamoto has come close by creating elaborate nightmare creatures and then not letting us have more than shaky glimpses of what they might be. 

Repeating another motif of late is imagery of life in water, both fish and microscopic. In Nightmare Detective, water indicates the organic boundaries between the physical and spiritual, and between one consciousness and another. Kagenuma descends in and out of dreamastates and others' selves by sinking onto the keel of a sunken ship. We also see imagery of fish and microscopic life.

Preparing to enter someone else's dream state, Kagenuma dresses in a rain slicker, and beneath that pants and shoes he can easily slip out of. It's a psychological trick, helping him find the right mental state by shedding encumbrances. The rain slicker looks a bit like a cape – echoing the visual cue from M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable but much more amusing as a jab at superhero costumes.

Tsukamoto can also be found in a visual motif that recurs from Vital, an act of mutual asphyxiation between two characters seeking oblivion together. This is not erotic asphyxiation, but shared hopelessness. Both films trade in depression without solving it. In Nightmare Detective, one character finds his depression linked to a buried childhood trauma while another who suffers looks into her own past and finds abundant joy. How did they both end up in the same place? It's the mystery that preoccupies Tsukamoto's movie.

Nightmare Detective is the first in a trilogy proposed by Shinya Tsukamoto. To date he has yet to begin production on the third film.

5 Short Films by Shinya Tsukamoto

The moment his father brought home an 8mm movie camera, young Shinya Tsukamoto appropriated it as his own and began experimenting. Inspired by the kaiju (monster) movies he loved, the first proper movie he made with the home camera was about a man who becomes a monster and destroys Tokyo. Film became a passion for him and he continued making movies throughout his school years recruiting everyone he could find including his older brother. Despite the budget he had to work with, his movies were often feature-length with fully developed scripts. These he would show to various school classes. Eventually Tsukamoto became involved in school theater, and on leaving school formed his own shortlived stage company. His officially recognized body of work numbers eight movies before the more widely known Phantom of Regular Size.

Phantom of Regular Size (1986, 18 minutes)

More correctly translated as Monster of Regular Size, meaning human-sized monster, Phantom was the rough sketch of an idea that would be fleshed out to become Tetsuo the Iron Man. This was Tsukamoto finding his voice through experimentation, content to let story and narrative slide. 

  

The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (1987, 45 minutes)

 Into every generation an Electric Rod Boy is born: one boy in all the wold, a chosen one. He alone will have the power to bring light to a world in darkness. He is the Electric Rod Boy.

Some five or six years before Buffy, high-schooler Kai was the chosen one fighting punk rock vampires in this short movie that fuses early music video style to manga, Back to the Future (or maybe the Terminator), Godzilla, and Plymptoons. It's a marvel of demented editing, stop motion, and no-budget ingenuity. It's also the most pure fun of anything Shinya Tsukamoto has made, a bright comedy about a dark future.

Kai is an odd child, picked on at school for his deformity: an electric rod growing out of his back. Let me clear something up about that, it's not a lighting rod – not some short little stick. No, it's a freakin' street pole! Sharing his shirt collar and growing to tower over him. That's the kind of movie you're dealing with: one in which, during a fight, a stuffed toy dog flies into the room and vomits stuffing for no apparent reason.

Kai's schoolmate Momo is sweet on him. She's also a fighter and rescues him from bullies. One day while he shows off his prototype for a time machine, he is suddenly whisked to the future by another machine appearing out of nowhere. Arriving twenty-five years into the future he finds the world has been conquered by vampires who have enslaved humanity. They have devices that keep the world shrouded in darkness for short periods of time. They are about to make that state permanent with an amplifier that uses an untouched female virgin as a battery. Awaiting Kai's arrival is a foe of the vampires, a mysterious woman who wears a photo album on her head like a professor's mortarboard. She tells Kai that he is the chosen one who is meant to defeat the vampires.

While there's not much meaning to any of this it's got a fully developed storyline that's easy enough to follow if you're quick enough to keep up with the visuals – not an easy task. t's brisk and funny, and hard to take your eyes off of. Kai is a polite kid, not goofy but engagingly awkward, and there's a gentle bond between Kai and his future mentor. (Kei Fujiwara in a much more substantial role than she would play as the subway attacker in Tetsuo). Among other signature likes, Tsukamoto works his love of giant monsters into the movie with a giant vampire looming over a miniature tokyo while spewing atomic breath ala Gojira. First time I've ever seen dai-kaiju that was a gorgeous nude woman. There's also a running sendup of the archetypal masculine hero of cinema: Kai is anything but the he-man type yet the dialog is taken up with double-ententes about how the power of his rod is going to save the world.

Tokage (2003, 50 minutes)

Tokage was commissioned by television network NHK for a series in which the works of famous Japanese authors would be narrated on film, as captured by noteworthy directors. Tsukamoto was asked to direct the short story Lizard, by Banana Yoshimoto.

Lizard concerns a love affair between two healers who are unable to heal their own psychic wounds. The narrator is a counselor for disturbed children. He has fallen in love with a profoundly sad woman nicknamed Lizard who longs for oblivion. Lizard has an uncanny ability to diagnose and treat other people's illnesses. The story follows their mutual fumbling towards the point where they can share with each other their most personal stories. The relationship – two depressives in despair, who seek mutual healing – looks forward to Vital, which Tsukamoto would direct the next year. So do some of the themes raised by the story, like psychic abilities and the question of soul independent of body though these are lightly touched upon. Properly, the tale is about empathy and the wounds left by trauma. Also anticipating Vital, it's one of the director's bleakest works.

Shot on hi-def video, Tokage follows actress Ryo as she reads Yoshimoto's text. Our first sight of her is in a bedroom, and then the camera follows through through a succession of rooms in what we soon realize is an abandoned building. As the story unfolds and the two lovers reveal more of their inner selves, the rooms Ryo visits show more alarming states of disrepair until we find ourselves in a cafeteria still festooned with the streamers that once saw a celebration. Tsukamoto films under a variety of light sources, primarily natural – they filmed it in a single continuous shot at sundown.

Jewel Beetle (2005, 22 minutes)

Named for a beetle whose lustrous wings make it desirable for ornamentative purposes, Jewel Beetle concerns a yakuza leader and the mistress he keeps far away from society. The relationshoip is founded on sexual fulfillment but the two are genuinely fond of each other. The woman (never named) is restless as she is not allowed to wander away from her remote cabin. The 'Old Man' (as she calls him) fears for her future should he be killed, which is becoming likely, so he introduces her to his young protege. 

There are three sex scenes in the movie: the first is a fully clothed interlude between the yakuza head and the woman, that speaks of the playfulness of long familiarity; the second is again fully clothed, tender, a tentative moment between the mistress and the young man, a less-than-chaste kiss with the camera close and intimate on their sweat-dewed faces, chaperoned by the sound of rain; the third is tension-relieving naked animal pleasure. I wonder whether this might be the first depiction of female ejaculation in a non-pornographic film. All of the scenes of the woman inside her cabin are caressed in blue, purple, and pink lighting. Jewel Beetle echoes A Snake of June in that the tale is about a woman who comes to realize that she owns her own sexuality and can choose autonomy.

Jewel Beetle was Shinya Tsukamoto's contribution to an anthology film titled Fîmeiru (Female), featuring works by Ryuichi Hiroki, Suzuki Matsuo, Miwa Nishikawa, and Tetsuo Shinohara.

Haze (2005, 49 minutes)

Haze is an exercise in extreme claustrophobia and paranoia, in that order. A man awakens in the dark, in a maximally confined space that offers only the slightest options for movement. He has no memory of who he is or how he got there. When it becomes apparent that the space is a maze, he attempts to find his way out amidst various hazards like pipes that grate along his teeth, nails protruding from the floor, and automated hammers that beat at him. All the while, he tortures himself with speculation: is he in hell? Has war broken out and he is in the hands of some enemy force? Has he been kidnapped by some rich sadist? The narrative is as closed in as the set, a limited film but a harrowing one that's impossible to look away from. Grimy, nasty, and terrifying, Haze is a darker exploration of an idea Tsukamoto first visited in Vital.

I have not yet seen either the short film that was entered in “Venice 70: Future Reloaded” or "Ayashiki bungô kaidan".

A Snake of June (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002)

“Go for it. Nobody can stop you.”

I'm having a hard time finding the right intro to this review of my favorite Shinya Tsukamoto movie. The first try started with a joke because, well, sex makes people nervous and they tell weak jokes. That's not right, though, A Snake of June defies that civilized timidity about sex so it seems to me starting that way dishonors the film and its brave lead performer Asuka Kurosawa . My second attempt was too severe for a film that is at times wickedly funny. This is my third try.

I shared A Snake of June with someone close to me, and she had three reactions I'll never forget: during one of the more bizarre sequences she asked “What the fuck am I looking at?”; at the fifty seven minute mark she stood up and cheered; when the closing credits began, she declared “That was fucking awesome.”

We're back to Tsukamoto's personal vision of Tokyo which now looks not merely like science fiction but a cubist's paradise. Seen at a distance or up close, it's a Tetris grid or Q-Bert mound packed tight. Everyone walks in Tokyo, you hardly ever see a car and when you do you don't see a street. The underground world of THX-1138 was more spacious than Tokyo. It's a great big art installment of a metropolis, pretty in an antiseptic way.

How do organic beings live in an antiseptic environment? Think about it. Humans are messy. Bodies are messy. We are masterpieces of bodily functions, organs that age and breathe and consume and produce, a symphony of natural actions and reactions. When your whole world is ascetic cleanliness and perfection, how does one not feel perpetually....dirty? Embarrassed? Imperfect? And while you're desperately hiding your own own, well, natural humanity, how do you not feel neurotic about how everyone else thinks of you?

Rinko and Shigehiko love each other dearly but theirs is a sexless marriage. Shigehiko ingests powders to neutralize the methane gases in his bowels, and all his passions are channeled into scrubbing the apartment. Rinko pours her heart into helping people at a suicide hotline. When she's at home, safely locked away even from her husband, she dresses as the sexual provocatrix she longs to be and gets herself off.

That is, she thinks no one can see her. She's wrong. A photographer (Shinya Tsukamoto) that Rinko saved from suicide wants to repay her, and his chosen gift is herself: for one night he's going to set her inner self free, even if it takes blackmail to get her there. “I don't want sex. I'm telling you to do what you want.”

Now...does that sound like a movie you've seen a hundred times before? Typical Hollywood sex thriller, right? Mmm, sex is baaad? Mmmkay? Stay celibate or sickos will try to kill you and everyone will think you're a horrible person, and your world will come right only once you disavow your own genitals.

No, no, no. This is the antithesis to the demonizing sex thriller. A Snake of June is that rarest of creatures, the movie that proposes sexuality as a redemptive force.

Everything about A Snake of June is unusual beginning with it's photography. It was shot on 16mm b&w stock, then blown up to 35mm on color stock, color-timed for a rich blue tint. This gives the movie an intensely textured grain that's more expressive than most anything else Tsukamoto has ever made. When Tsukamoto films his lead actress' more sensual moments, the effect is startling in its intimacy...you can feel the warmth of her flesh, she glows with a thousand tiny beads of sweat, each one a crystal the camera loves. You can smell the overripe flowers, feel the rain seep through your clothing. 

That rain is ever present – cleansing, cascading, drumming, soaking. In Tokyo Fist, Bullet ballet, and Gemini Tsukamoto had included shots of a dead animal being devoured by maggots: messy, vital, vulnerable....physical.  In AsoJ his camera finds a snail, a dichotomy with is hard-shelled living space and gooey body, beautiful in its alien way. The circles of its shell add to a visual motif of circles within the 4:3 aspect ratio and the blocks of the city. Every time a camera looks through a circular opening we witness life at its highest potency. Circular opening are at once feminine, a rebuke of the harsh straight line, and a pointer to the voyeurism that runs through AsoJ.

Long-time collaborator Chu Ishikawa's contribution can't be overestimated. He keeps the film on the right tonal track with a languid sax, jazz lifted without disguise from old burlesque clubs. It's an amused riff that lets you know nothing here is threatening.

Indeed, there are some strange turns. Following Shigehiko and Iguchi (Rinko's stalker) leads to sequences that owe to poetic or intuitive sensibilities. The director doesn't explain them to his fans, and no I don't know what the fuck we're looking at precisely but the poetic logic of the situations does suggest answers. They make a hell of an impression, too, quite alarming: at one point Iguchi leads us to an avant-garde SM club; later. He confronts Shigehiko bearing a prosthesis from Tetsuo II (and, less directly, all the Tetsuo iterations). It's wierd, it belongs to the world of dreams or fables, but it works. 

The first tour de force setpiece follows Rinko as she takes her first walk through the city, under the guidance of her mysterious blackmailer. Per his instructions she has dressed as her secret persona in a tight, short leather skirt and no panties. The camera matches her POV and her inner state – eyes down, afraid of eye contact with faces she's certain are staring at her, constricted, desperate to be unobtrusive. That's only the beginning of an astonishing sequence that sees the actress through a gauntlet of outrageous challenges to her psyche.

Which brings me to Asuka Kurosawa. I cannot praise her enough, either her acting or her beauty. Kurosawa has a commanding presence and innate intelligence. It's a role that could well have been overperformed, become comical or hysteric. In Kurosawa's hands, Rinko maintains her integrity as a persona through her entire personal arc. Over the course of the movie Kurosawa is asked to expose body and soul to a most invasive degree. Simply put, we believe the story because we never for a moment disbelieve that Rinko is a real person with real feelings. Kurosawa owns this movie. So far this is one of only three films of hers I've seen, the others being Cold Fish (Sion Sono, 2010) and Himizu (Sion Sono, 2011). In Cold Fish she plays a psychopath with delicious glee, as different from Rinko as one could get, and equally mesmerizing. See the two together and you'll never doubt her star power.

Over my reviews of Shinya Tsukamoto's directorial works I've neglected to mention his acting, and now's a good place to redress that. His early roles in Tetsuos I and II are splashy but aren't deep enough to merit a closer look. On the other hand, the older Tsukamoto in later works stands out as a sympathetic everyman. His quiet demeanor and forlorn, hurt eyes provide a sturdy foundation for Tokyo Fist and Bullet Ballet. In AsoJ he moves to the side for his lead actress, yet Iguchi is no less moving than she is. The stalker is more sympathetic than Rinko's beloved Shigehiko (Yûji Kôtari). He's a plain-looking man. Stocky, unmuscular, bald, he's everything the Hollywood romantic type isn't. Shigehiko is no villain – there are no villains in AsoJ – rather he's in the same place that Rinko is: paralizingly embarrassed at his own body. The difference is that if Shigehiko cannot overcome his fear, it's Rinko who will pay dearly for it.

There is a scene at the end of the second act that is the most erotically charged thing I've ever seen in a movie, and the most rewarding...transgressive, transcendent, triumphant..and just damn sexy as hell. It's tempting to say that A Snake of June is not for those uncomfortable with sex, but the opposite is true: it's exactly those people who should be seeing this movie. That's the whole premise and plot! However discomfiting the premise sounds, a deep empathy emerges for these people. They're human beings, full of potential in their physical existence but precarious of ego. Ultimately it isn't sex alone that carries the day but compassion and love. The lesson is that the three together are indestructible and must be respected as such.

If it were the policy to play movies instead of music at funerals, A Snake of June would be playing at mine. It is fucking awesome.

Sôseiji aka Gemini (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1999)

“I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.”

“I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. “

“...it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”

- from the modern Hippocratic Oath

I am restricted from telling too much about Sôseiji. That would be robbing the film of its mysteries. It may have to suffice that you know it's a Grimm's Fairy Tale of a film about a doctor who may not survive a meeting with his doppleganger. Is the doppleganger real? A ghost, a mental aberration...an act of God? A figure of punishment, or one of redemption? The first time I saw Gemini, I didn't know whether what was happening onscreen was meant to be taken at face value. I guessed wrong.

It is 1910 as the Meiji Era nears a close, and Yukio is settling into his life at home after attending the wounded in the Russo/Japan War. Yukio has earned the trust and accolades of his peers and his community. He is nothing if not respectable, and highly civilized in his parents' image. They have made him the man he is, from his father's ethics to his mother's deepseated bigotry toward the poor.

Yukio has a wife, Rin. Rin was once a patient, having been rescued after a fire and suffering from amnesia. There's no love lost between Rin and the parents: she is acceptable charity. Something about her bothers Yukio's mother, but Rin remains just this side of objectionable. Lucky for Yukio, or he wouldn't have the spine to love her. All told, Yukio has a very comfortable life. A respectable life.

Even so, Yukio is uneasy. He's bothered by matters of conscience regarding the oath he took as a physician, and he senses he's being watched by someone outside the household which doubles as his clinic.

Not long after he makes a critical decision Yukio meets his twin, who promptly throws him down a dry well. The double assumes Yukio's identity and begins to rehabilitate the doctor's image all the while keeping Yukio alive to torment him.

More of the plot than that I won't tell. To be honest I'm still studying the film. Aspects of it have gone unexamined as I've just now gotten a grasp on the triangle at the heart of the film. 

Director Tsukamoto is again working for-hire but unlike with Hiruko the Goblin this time he makes something personal to himself of a short story by Edogawa Rampo. Gemini unfolds with all the logic of a fable, depending on ironies as tragic as they are unlikely and on outrageous twists of fate. Leaving Tokyo behind with all its cold surfaces, everything else opens up from the claustrophobic to the lush and open: a rural village setting of trees and rivers, homes of ascetic formal beauty and tranquility, slums filled with color-bedecked survivors who entertain for scraps. The director's visual palette is given free voice to soar with natural colors, and bold lighting: cold white floods, sunset oranges, purples, greens. It's one of Tsukamoto's most beautiful movies to look at. The natural world suits him and he should go there more often.

The first time we see the double, he appears as a wraith from Japanese lore, a savage storm of colorful rags and pelts. It's one of the movies most memorable moments as he poses and cartwheels like an actor in a more traditional Japanese stage drama. Gemini is a stylistic melange on other levels as well, from lighting to costumes. For sound, Chu Ishikawa's driving industrial beats are traded for creepy disjointed vocals and a delicate piano lament. 

Tsukamoto is often compared to David Cronenberg for the body horrors of Tetsuo and Videodrome. I think the comparison between these two directors has never been so appropriate as here, though for a different reason. Cronenberg's cinema has always been concerned with the mutability of identity. Tssukamoto has always focused on hidden sides to the psyche, identities repressed. Rin still fulfills that function in Gemini, but what the fates have in store for Yukio and his doppleganger go well beyond his usual obsession with releasing inner furies. Rin herself is a puzzlebox, cautiously letting us in on her own journey of identity shifts a little at a time. Rin and Yukio share that in common, both base their identities on fear of society's judgment.

One of the most rewarding things about Tsukamoto's work is that there is always something new to discover on further viewings. For example, an important aspect of Sôseiji is the ways in which the director contrasts the life of poverty with that of privilege. I should be writing about that but I'm barely beginning to see that facet of the movie myself. Until now I've still been sorting out the dynamics of the central characters (the M-F-M triangle again).

I will dare to say that the fairy tale tone of Sôseiji allows Tsukamoto to give full unabashed voice to his humanism for the first time, but ya know what? I'm still guessing. The final sequence of shots are still ambiguous enough to make me wonder whether the lesson has been learned. I prefer to think that it has.

Bullet Ballet (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)

I have to confess up front that an aspect of this movie is always going to fly right over my head. Guns aren't my thing, neither are they a pet issue for me. They have iconic power in the West. The rest of the world sees the West as gun-crazed. I can scarcely imagine what iconic meaning guns must have in Japan where private ownership is illegal.

Whatever that might be, a gun cannot be obtained in Tokyo without going to a great deal of trouble. Goda (Shinya Tsukamoto) badly wants one. Not just any gun, but the same model that ended his girlfriend's life. If he can wrap his hand around its grip, Goda hopes, maybe he'll be able to wrap his head around her suicide.

Goda's mind is in a spiral. What was she doing with a gun?? Was she involved in criminal activity? Drugs? Why did she kill herself? She must have led another life, had another side of herself that he never knew about, that she never trusted him with. Now he can never ask her about it.

There is one person who might give him insight. Not long ago Goda saved a young woman from apparent suicide, a street punk named Chisato. She wasn't overly grateful, judging by the teeth marks she left in him.

Chisato belongs to a restless street gang that gets its kicks and its money from shaking down salarymen like Goda, the symbol of a society they despise, when they're not rumbling with rival gangs. They're low on the totem pole of urban crime, but none of them really care as it's mostly just passing the time. Facing their own futures, most of them are secretly making their ways into that domesticated life. Secretly, because it shames them with their peers.

Chisato isn't like them. Chisato sees no future that doesn't terrify her. Where the others plan out their lives, Chisato joins the violence night after night waiting for oblivion.

Once a gun enters the mix, everything changes. They're all headed for a collision.

Filmed in stark black and white with a handheld camera that emphasizes restlessness, Tsukamoto finds a Tokyo his movies have never shown before – the real one. It's an exciting place, especially at night mixing it up at street level. Tokyo Fist was shot with an artist's eye, Bullet Ballet trades that for a documentarian immediacy. So too does the director continue to find new departure points for his past concerns.

Violence is swift, unglamorized., and emotionally gutpunching – knowing his life is about to end, one youth is on the phone. “Mom”, he says with heartbreaking regret, “I'm not coming home.” the next moment his head has a hole in it.

Chisato could be the spiritual relation to Hizuru of Tokyo Fist except that she lacks Hizuru's spark of life. She belongs neither to nor with anyone, the gang being wallpaper to her bored existence. Goda is just another distraction until he persists in invading on her awareness and that of the gang. He's a mystery, and in him she begins to see a reflection of herself that gang life no longer offers. Goda, in fact, is sinking to her level of alienation from life.

Meanwhile, the gang's alpha male, Goto, comes into possession of the much-sought-after weapon. At first, it's an easy tool to resort to and threatens to change the balance of power between rival gangs, a fact not unnoticed by their Yakuza elders. Soon enough “shit gets real” and the power of the gun unmans Goto.

There's no message to be found. Tsukamoto isn't interested in guns as a political issue any more than I am. What Bullet Ballet is instead is a potent meditation on generational experience and depression. Chisato is compellingly played by the beautiful and sexy Kirina Mano, with pixie haircut, tight leather miniskirt, and street-ugly Doc Martens. It's not an easy role, and she essays it with mercurial shifts of ennui, and cynical amusement giving way to wonder and vulnerability. In a repeated gesture that becomes a motif, she stands with her arms out, unguarded (one could say Christlike). She stands over the edge of a subway platform with her arms stretched out as it rushes past at her back - “I'm open to the death this might bring”. Later she will strike the same pose during a gang brawl when about to be struck with a weapon (“I'm open to your blows”. The final shots of the film will see her “open” once again, running the streets of Tokyo, and it will mean something completely different.

Tsukamoto further questions the modern urbanite life as he's done with previous films. Goda shared a life with a woman he didn't realize until too late that he didn't fully know. Later, another stranger asks him to marry her for legal residency – once married she'll go her way unless he wishes occasional sex as payment. No intimacy required, no human bonds sought.

To date, this was Tsukamoto's most mature and sophisticated work, his best and my third personal favorite. It gets my highest recommendation.

Tokyo Fist (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1995)

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.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992)

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992)

Hell is industrial. It is red and stinks of molten iron and sweat, it reeks of outrage and desire. Life in Tokyo, on the other hand, is blue and sterile. It's not really life at all. It's where men spend their years repressing their feelings under the cultivation of model domestic conformity and dreaming at night of grassy fields they no longer remember the colors of.

Shinya Tsukamoto's second Tetsuo film is not a sequel but a companion piece, another take on the same premise and themes of the first. Tomoro Taguchi again plays a salaryman, this time named Tomoo and married to a wife named Kana. Tomoo and Kana have a young son, Minori. One day two thugs (reminded me of the punks from Jean-Jacque Beneix's Diva) assault the family while out shopping at a mall. After injecting Tomoo with a foreign substance, the thugs initiate a campaign of terror involcing the kidnapping of the boy. Their purpose is to trigger a transformation in Tomoo. They succeed, and the results are monstrous – for Minori most of all.

The thugs are part of a cult led by Yatsu (Shinya Tssukamoto), a mysterious figure with the bizarre ability to turn his body into mechanized weaponry. Yatsu and his gang live in a factory and spend their hours bodybuilding – metaphorically hammering flesh and bone into hardbodies that gleam like polished metal. They serve a shady experiment in mad science with Tomoo as their chosen target for reasons that Yatsu will reveal over the course of the film.

This is Tsukamoto's second feature film in color, but the first in which he applies it to his personal aesthetic (Hiruko the Goblin having been work for hire). He's stated that the Tetsuo movies were born of his hatred for the city and the impossibility of retaining any relationship with nature there. His Tokyo is a place of hard, featureless surfaces as far as the eye can see: glass, concrete, tile, chrome. The lights are cold there. Tsukamoto shoots almost the entire movie stressing blue or red with lighting or filters. Tomoo's world is blue, but when he begins to push himself at a gym both his skin and the chromed weight machine reflect the subtlest hints of red – a warning.

Tetsuo II is not well regarded by most fans of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. That's unfortunate because it's a more accomplished piece and still a kick in the head, but it's an understandable response. In the earlier film, Tsukamoto was refining techniques he had explored on home video without a budget and the result was an anarchic howl that apparently spat on comforting filmic conventions. It was a breathless fusion of cocaine, adrenaline, and lust. No wonder it gained a cult following, and no wonder that a followup would inevitably fail to be as fresh or as jolting. Still, anyone who had seen the director's short film A Monster of Regular Size should have predicted this trend because it's the same story in even less coherent form – The Iron Man was the second version, and the process of refinement and added coherence had already begun.

With this third version Tsukamoto adds nothing new to his bag of tricks (shocking fast cuts, stop-motion, Raimi-esque camera moves and wirework among others) but he hardly needs to. By now he kows the tricks well enough to employ them with confidence and authority. Instead, Tsukamoto shifts his focus to advancing his skill as a storyteller. What he comes up with is much more straight-forward in narrative yet more ambivalent in treatment, and more nuanced.

Start with Tsukamoto's favored structure of two men at war with each other and the woman caught in the middle. One man, the antagonist, usually sees something in the other that reflects himself and sets out to transform the protagonist. How this affects the woman is never the same from one film to the next, and the women of his early films went unexplored. In Tetsuo II Kana seems to exist to underscore the idea that male sexuality is by nature all about an innate desire to destroy. She stands out as both the only female in the movie and the only one in the film whose response to loss and grief is not wholesale rage. This is spelled out in stark terms in a sex scene late in the film. Personally I think it's a simplistic, mistaken view of both genders and is actually a step backwards from a more complex understanding expressed in the first film, one he would return to in Tokyo Fist. Really? Women have no capacity for violence or destruction? Wendy O. Williams would have disagreed. Even so this film introduces a vital ingredient that went missing before: empathy, expressed by Kana and even Yatsu himself. It's the beginning of humanism in Tukamoto's body of work, the one element without which he'd not be one of my favorite filmmakers. Tetsuo II is still an apocalyptic vision that suggests the only way to be at peace is to be the last man standing.

In another nuance, this Tetsuo offers no alternative to the sterility of the city. Instead of embracing the howl of anarchy in the face of conformity, the solution proffered by Yatsu's tribe is fascism – that's no path to freedom!

The movie still has enough horror to qualify for the genre, but feels more like a comic book – a true manga (it's not for the kiddies!) or something out of The Incredible Hulk. When Tomoo Hulks out he has a grin that would scare even the Joker.