Monday, May 25, 2015

Vital (Shinya Tskamoto, 2004)



Deconstructing Vital to discover its meaning is a lot like dissecting a body in an attempt to find the physical mechanisms of the soul. (There, I've found my first incision.)

(caveat, somewhat spoilery review)



Hiroshi awakens from a coma following a car crash. He has no memory of his identity or his life. His parents tell him as gently as they can that he had burnt out, lost his vital spark. Once he had planned to be a doctor, or an artist. Later he will leanr that he had a girlfriend, Ryoko, a beautiful young woman with a tattoo of a blue bird on her arm. She was in the crash and died soon after.

Inspired by one of his old med school textbooks, Hiroshi re-enrolls and thus acquires a pathology class assignment and a new girlfriend. With the new girlfriend, Ikumi, he fails to connect emotionally. In contrast, his studies light up his mind. The class will examining four cadavers over the course of four months. The one assigned to Hiroshi has a tattoo of a blue bird on her arm.

Shinya Tsukamoto's career to date had been a series of meditations on reconciling the organic physicality of the body with the soul-crushing artificiality of its modern city home. Vital marks a radical advance in his vision. The movie begins with shots of a zombified Hiroshi in the city, shot with cold blue color timing. This will be familiar to anyone who knows the director's work. From there, though, the movie takes an unexpected turn inward, toward spirituality. This is a new theme for Tsukamoto but a natural one given the humanism inherent in his previous work, especially the journey of conscience made by the doctor in Gemini.

Hiroshi begins to recover memories of Ryoko...except that some of them don't feel like memories, or dreams. Turning to her grieving parents, he learns that Ryoko had lost her own essence of life, the two had shared that one thing in common. For example, she had never danced. When Hiroshi imagines he is with her, she dances. She smiles, she laughs...and when he says it's time to go home, she weeps in panic. When they are together, it is in on unspoiled beaches in verdant locales, unlike anything in Hiroshi's day-to-day life. Are these memories? Is he imagining these moments? Or is it possible that he shares a link with Ryoko's spirit after her death that cannot be separated by the bounds of body? Ryoko says that she doesn't feel real anymore, like her existence has become a dream reality.



There is a central image in Vital that I think marks the whole film. Hiroshi meets Ryoko at an abandoned building Clearly visible surrounding the ruins is that lush verdant paradise. Within the building is a massive chunk of earth and rock: nature both within and without the body. It's an image straight out of Tarkovsky.



This isn't the first time Tsukamoto had gone green, but it's his most effective use of natural setting so far. These scenes are colorful warm, sensual, flowing with ease and comfort, solace and joy. Life. The director has also opted for a more naturalisitc depiction of Tokyo: though still cold and blue, it is no longer the exaggerated sterile dystopia of earlier films...just dreary. It's clearly inhabited by life and the attendant decay. Likewise, the med school setting is in a constant cold and sickly green light. Breaking this up, we often see Hiroshi bathed in red light when he's immersing in inner turmoil. Some of Tsukamoto's signature freneticism is on display, like handheld shots of smokestacks or Ryoko dancing, but they appear in rare bursts braking out of a repressed funk. Chu Ishikawa gifts the film with tender quietude, seldom breaking into industrial beats.

There are extensive scenes of dissections in which Tsukamoto can indulge his own background in illustrative art and a flirtation with wanting to become a doctor...for some of us, not easy to watch. To be honest, I'm plenty squeamish. It helps that Tsukamoto has decided to render his bodies in plastic, to look like physical manifestations of the beautiful anatomical renderings done in pencil – there's not a hint of gooeyness, of bodily fluids. Well – not visually, anyway. One scene has a memorable upkeep of sploshy sounds as Hiroshi works. We watch Hiroshi, Ikumi watches Hiroshi, Hiiroshi has eyes only for Ryoko's body. 



Ikumi has a story, though it isn't the central one. The MFM triangle that usually forms the structure of a Tsukamoto movie is inverted for a FMF formation, but it isn't one of equal sides. Ikumi at least has more spark inside her than Hiroshi does, but it is on danger of going out – the suicide of a professor she's been intimate with leaves her unmoved, and she discusses her lack of response as if unsure whether to be concerned for herself. I'm still studying her story to figure out its place in the story. To be honest, this is one of the director's movies I visit least though I feel it's among his best. Vital is a movie informed by the process of grieving, a search for solace and closure I'm too close to. It is a movie that seeks not joy but peace. For Tsukamoto, it's exploratory surgery.

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