Tag Archives: Shinya Tsukamoto

CAPSULE: SHADOW OF FIRE (2023)

Hokaje

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DIRECTED BY:

CAST: Shuri, , Ouga Tsukao

PLOT: Amidst robberies and other exploits, a young boy tries his best to survive in the black market area of a ravaged town in post-WWII Japan; his path intersects with other struggling characters, including a war widow and a man who recruits him for an unknown enterprise.

Still from Shadow of Fire (2023)

COMMENTS: Shadow of Fire is the latest offering by Shinya Tsukamoto; more specifically, the Tsukamoto who brought us films such as  Kotoko, Fires on the Plain, and Killing. These late-career outings see the director opt for a more conventional register, while keeping more or less all of the trademarks that define his peculiar filmmaking style.

In the immediate aftermath of WWII, an unnamed war orphan makes his way through a devastated town’s black market, eventually finding refuge in a tavern kept by a woman who has resorted to prostitution after the loss of her husband and her son. She soon develops a motherly affection for the boy; the inn also begins receiving frequent visits from a young soldier.

In spite of all the differences that separate Shadow of Fire from Tsukamoto’s earlier work, the sensibility of the Tetsuo director is still on display here, not only in certain aesthetic choices but also in film’s core themes: for instance, the emphasis on the thinness of the barrier between what we call “human” and whatever lies outside its fragile boundaries. The soldier who finds shelter in the tavern undergoes, at a sudden reminder of his wartime torments, a quick transformation, unlike those in the director’s more fantastical productions, but no less terrifying precisely because of how plausible it is. (One can only imagine how many veterans underwent similar transmogrifications.) Equally notable is how repressed subjects (in this case, war traumas) are always ready to burst forth violently and dramatically—this time, not through physical mutations or explosions of steel and monstrous flesh, but in eruptions of emotional intensity. Shadow of Fire portrays an environment of disquieting uncertainty that underlies even its warmer moments, such as the familial bonding that develops between the three characters, with horror always on the periphery, looking to intrude at the slightest invitation.

In moments like these Tsukamoto’s DIY approach reveals its strengths. The handheld camera adds immersion and immediacy, and a visceral sense of physicality that heightens the brutality. The more discrete scenes might not be pulled off as efficiently, but they are as satisfactorily executed as in a piece by a more traditional filmmaker.

In any case, the drama is genuinely compelling: in particular, the plotline involving the boy’s dalliances with a mysterious man with whom he tags along for a mission whose nature is never disclosed, apart from the fact that it requires the boy to carry a pistol. Tsukamoto maintains an effective sense of tension and intrigue until this arc’s climax, which ties in with the film’s overarching themes of the lasting effects of trauma and dehumanization.

The film’s entire POV is the boy’s, much like in the masterful Soviet war film Come and See. While the adults surrounding him deal with a variety of war scars, his plot arc mirrors his condition as an orphan. Throughout his journey, he finds himself successively abandoned, first by a new mother figure (who unexpectedly rejects him after their time together), and then a masculine figure who accompanies him for a tragically short but intense stint.

The film’s coda may be unnecessary, but further testifies to Tsukamoto’s compromise to conventional narrative film trappings, attempting to close all of the plot’s loose ends and develop them to a conclusion (that is, within the climate of uncertainty that envelops the entire scenario).

Shadow of Fire will please Tsukamoto fans who have stayed on board for his more “sober” output, like his post-2010 war films or, for a less recent example, 2004’s Vital. While the director’s style might not always lend itself seamlessly to the premise at hand, and the content might inevitably lead to cliché and over-trodden territory, the power of certain scenes is undeniable. Shadow is a worthy addition to the Japanese icon’s resumé.

The reviewer saw this film at Fantasporto’s 2024 festival; U.S. release plans are uncertain at this time.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is not an easy watch, but, driven by performances that range from haunting and affecting, to terrifying and grotesque, it is a powerful one.”–Wendy Ide, Screen Daily (festival screening)

22*. A SNAKE OF JUNE (2002)

 Rokugatsu no hebi

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Yûji Kôtari, Shinya Tsukamoto

PLOT: Rinko is a shy and inhibited woman working as a counselor at a suicide hotline. One day, a photographer she previously helped sends her compromising photos of herself. The stalking turns into blackmail when he forces her to live out her erotic fantasies, which take on an increasingly hallucinatory character.

Still from A Snake of June (2002)

BACKGROUND:

  • Shinya Tsukamoto’s seventh film, after Gemini (1999).
  • A Snake of June debuted at the 59th Venice International Film Festival (2002), where it won a special award (the Kinematrix Film Award, which does not appear to have been awarded before or since).
  • Tsukamoto and main actress Asuka Kurosawa were respectively awarded the Special Jury Award and Best Actress Award at 2003’s edition of Fantasporto (Porto International Film Festival).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The unusual garb of the erotic cabaret’s patrons, who sport funnel masks as they watch an equally offbeat performance.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic drowning performance; corrugated pipe assault

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although modest by the director’s standards, A Snake of June stands out by all other measures of weirdness through its gradual abandonment of conventional narrative logic to indulge in surreal displays of interlacing horror, desire and sadism.


Restoration trailer for A Snake of June (2002)

COMMENTS: A Snake of June starts off surprisingly restrained for a Continue reading 22*. A SNAKE OF JUNE (2002)

“SOLID METAL NIGHTMARES”: THE SHINYA TSUKAMOTO BOX SET

is more than the sum of his parts–his cold, greased parts. During my progression through Arrow’s 2020 release of Solid Metal Nightmares, I became familiar with the director/actor/screenwriter/producer/creative designer. From his roots as a glibly nihilistic visionary, he grew into a sanguinely nihilistic storyteller. Arrow’s boxed set puts virtually all his history on display for enjoyment and dissection.

The dissection comes in the form of the many extras, some of which are bulleted below:

  • Audio commentaries on all ten features (or near-features) from Tom Mes–an expert in Japanese cinema, I am informed, but those who know me know I haven’t listened to these
  • Half-a-dozen-or-so interviews with the director from over the years, including one exclusive to the set
  • Archival featurettes, documentaries, music clips, and trailers
  • A beautiful, hard-bound book with essays about each of the films included, typically in thematic pairings
  • Reversible title sleeves for the individual Blu-ray discs
  • The requisite double-sided poster (alas, no “postcards” for this; I’d have loved them to send notes to friends and loved ones)
  • And a box

I knew “Solid Metal Nightmares” would soon become a collector’s item, even beyond its designated collector status. I ordered this set back when it was new (I paid some sixty bucks for it new; it now fetches close to two hundred on the secondary market), and the box I received showed up  a bit damaged. I felt the damage was appropriate to the collection, however: every hero and heroine Tsukamoto puts to screen is irrevocably damaged in some way. I’m thinking of sending the package back to the director for him to spruce up with some bolts and metal filings.

Still from Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989)
Tetsue: The Iron Man

These past months a number of you will have noticed random Tsukamoto reviews cropping up on the site, giving a rough timeline of my journey. As I feel is always the case, the movie is the thing to judge—how it’s transferred visually, how the audio feels on the eardrums, and whether the framing integrity is maintained. Rest assured, dear reader, that all the films—Tetsuo: the Iron ManTetsuo II: Body HammerThe Adventure of Denchu-KozoTokyo FistBullet BalletHazeA Snake of JuneVitalKotoko, and Killing—look and feel as close to Tsukamoto’s celluloid (and later, digital) dreams as possible. Nothing is too crisp (I’m looking at you, Tetsuo), nothing is washed-out, and every clink, slam, kachunk, sigh, scream, whisper, and driving soundtrack blasts—or not—as appropriate.

Just about every film included is at least recommendable, but I cannot help raise an eyebrow at one exclusion and one inclusion. The exclusion first: for reasons beyond my understanding, Tsukamoto’s early (and color!) short film, Futsû saizu no kaijin, is nowhere to be seen—which is a pity, as it laid the ground work for the more expansive Tetsuo: the Iron Man that followed a few years later. Ah well.

The odd inclusion—which I was more than happy enough to watch, mind you—is his latest film, Killing. This movie does have some “metal” in it, albeit only in the opening scene where we witness a katana being forged. However, it is a contemplative period drama set in the late Edo period, and tonally is a very calm (albeit rather depressing) vision of Imperial decline. It is a good movie, to be certain, and watching Shinya Tsukamoto as an aging ronin is a treat. But as the finale in a collection dubbed “Solid Metal Nightmares,” it’s a bit incongruous.

Fans of Shinya Tsukamoto who don’t already own this are probably few and far between. To those who didn’t have the good luck of snapping this up on pre-order, I would still argue that the current $200 price tag is well worth the outlay. With a little luck, the folks at Arrow will re-release this, and then put together a set of the director’s other features. (May I suggest “Solid Metal Daydreams”?)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A wholly original moviemaking genius who most certainly paved the way for the outlaw likes of Takashi Miike or Sion Sono, his films often took a surreal, hyperkinetic audiovisual approach to his visceral character studies.  Frequently ultraviolent, psychosexual and dripping with physicality, Tsukamoto’s work resembles nothing which came before in the annals of Japanese cinema.”–Andrew Kotwicki, The Movie Sleuth (box set)

CAPSULE: KOTOKO (2011)

コトコ

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Shinya Tsukamoto

FEATURING: Cocco, Shinya Tsukamoto

PLOT: A young mother suffering from violent hallucinations loses custody of her son before a mild-mannered novelist enters her life.

COMMENTS: As my trip through Shinya Tsukamoto’s back-catalogue continues, my appreciation for his genius grows. Kotoko manages to be the most straightforward of his films while also being the most disturbing. There is no metal grafting, no superhuman violence, and, despite the narrator’s unreliability, the action is grounded in the mundane. The dark, harrowing side of the mundane. Perhaps not “weird” for our purposes (though it comes close), Kotoko stands out among the auteur’s typical work—and proves that Tuskamoto’s toolkit of perturbation extends far beyond his “typical” mechano-nihilistic visions.

We first meet Kotoko (J-Pop star “Cocco”) as she narrates how she sees “double”. At any moment Kotoko, may witness someone doing one thing—reading along with a toddler, say—only to see that person’s double as well, typically acting as a raging, violent id. She is aware of her condition, an affliction she can only ward off through song. Her sole motivation for enduring is her infant son. After a dramatic breakdown spurred by a child’s screams and spilled stir-fry, the boy is taken into her sister’s custody. Kotoko’s latent self-destructive tendencies worsen until she meets a quiet writer (Shinya Tuskamoto), who overhears her singing on a bus and decides to stalk her.

The first act is unsettling, the third act is nigh-on devastating. But the second—that’s where Kotoko is most bizarre. “What madness ensues?,” you ask. Amazingly, none. The film’s middle tranche is the “romantic comedy” filling of an otherwise dispiriting donut of a story. Cocco and Tsukamoto have a magical, socially inept chemistry. As a shy and somewhat bumbling literary celebrity, Tuskamoto adds “awkward romantic interest” to his acting arsenal (previously limited to “metal fetishist” and “emotionally benumbed salaryman”). During one of his stalking-visits, he fears the worst when Kotoko doesn’t answer her door, so he breaks in and finds her bleeding on her bathroom floor. Kotoko reaches almost mad-cap levels of silly dialogue and physical comedy as he charges back and forth between the bathroom and the place where she keeps the towels, always grabbing the wrong piece of fabric, while Kotoko patiently and bleedingly gestures and corrects him.

Had this continued, Kotoko would deserve a place amongst our esteemed, weird titles. That it does not isn’t a failure in filmmaking, of course, but a testament to the versatility of Tsukamoto. Instead, the rom-com provides the audience a much-needed breather between the setting up and knocking down of the titular heroine. Kotoko is something of a vanity project for the famous J-Pop star, but it is one of the oddest celebrity vehicles I’ve ever seen. Whether teary-eyed, widely smiling, writhing, singing, or dancing, Cocco exhibits a violent vulnerability not typically associated with mega-stars. With Tsukamoto, she finds the perfect technician to bring her vision to life; with Cocco, Tsukamoto gets to prove that whatever the story is, he can tell it–even if there aren’t any gears, cogs, or drill-bits.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…few films can claim to give such an uncompromising view of what it must be like to be crazy, as seen from the inside. Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’ comes to mind, or Polanski’s ‘Repulsion.’ Both of these films are not the easiest to watch, especially when seen for the first time, and ‘Kotoko’ is a lot like that.” -Ard Vijn, Screen Anarchy (festival screening)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TOKYO FIST (1995)

東京フィスト

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DIRECTED BY: Shinya Tsukamoto

FEATURING: Shinya Tsukamoto, Kahori Fujii, Kôji Tsukamoto

PLOT: Tsuda Yoshiharu is a mild-mannered salaryman whose engagement winds up on the rocks after an old high school friend suddenly reappears in his life.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA LIST: Tsukamoto’s take on the boxing melodrama is, for the most part, “only” as strange as one might expect from the auteur of body-mechanics. However, the explosive triple-climax of sports violence, body horror, and metallo-spiritual fervor wrenches Tokyo Fist from the realm of the merely eccentric and slams it squarely into the pulsing weird sensors of the viewer’s brainpan.

COMMENTS: With its jerky camera work and dissonant soundscape, Tetsuo: the Iron Man would seem like lightning captured in a bottle—a one-time occurrence. Heaven knows its spiritual sequel never quite managed to capture the frenetic discomfort of Tsukamoto’s paean to corporeal mechanization. Perhaps it was filming in color, perhaps it was the attempt to graft an actual story on to the madness—whatever it was, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer feels like a softer cousin of the original man of iron. In Tokyo Fist, Tuskamoto reclaims that lightning he captured that first time around, somehow harnessing its electricity to transform a simple tale of romantic betrayal and depression into a jolting and exhausting treatise on violence and revenge.

Tsuda Yoshiharu (Shinya Tsukamoto) represents any black-tied, white-shirted salaryman in greater Tokyo. He sells insurance packages. He apologizes obsequiously. And he’s constantly worn out and perspiring. It’s been so long since he’s had sex with his fiancée Hizuru (Kahoro Fujii) that neither can remember when they last thus exerted themselves. A colleague browbeats him into passing along a “gift” of cash to professional boxer Kojima (Kôji Tsukamoto, Shinya’s real-life brother). As fate would have it, Kojima is an old high school buddy of Tsuda’s. It’s no happy reunion, though, when the boxer starts showing up uninvited, and seduces the good salaryman’s lady.

So what happens next? Tsuda joins the boxing club that Kojima belongs to—pursuing a more traditional variety of “body alteration” than in Tetsuo—and things get violent. This is all to be expected in a boxing/romance/revenge/redemption movie. However, each of those four genre flag-posts is subverted here. Starting with redemption: Tsuda’s quest to buff up and out box his rival turns into something on the spiritual side of suicidal. His revenge becomes moot when Hizuru shows strange signs of her own personal change: what begins with a tattoo escalates to the self-installation of increasingly large piercings in increasingly deep chunks of her flesh. The romance between Tsuda and Hizuru seems almost non-existent, just a cutesy momentum that is instantly derailed by the intrusion of the (occasionally feral) Kojima.

And then there’s the boxing. It’s worth mentioning the “reality” of Tokyo Fist and how it’s captured before elaborating. At the start, everything’s traditionally lit: the “salaryman introduction” drives home a hyper-normality. Increasingly, though, Tsukamoto takes his lighting cues from silent films. Nighttime is always a lush blue tone; the daytime becomes harsh. Eventually the only realism appears during boxing matches. And as expected, Tsukamoto doesn’t shy away from jarring sound. There’s always the risk of an earful of grinding rivets to ruin one’s complacency as the training room montages begin writhing staccato-style on top of each other. Slam editing, slam sound, slamming faces, slamming flesh, culminating in a mystical blood spout finale. This ain’t no Rocky.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is a film about sex and violence, and viewed as such it approaches the level of a masterpiece, albeit a distinctly surreal one.”–Marv Savlov, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)