Monday, March 16, 2015

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment