Hey folks, Harry here... Now this sounds like one hella-cool film festival up in New York! Getting to see Tsukamoto's VITAL on the big screen with an audience rather than some Region 3 DVD... sigh. I want ballsy Asian American Distributor that just puts 3 titles a month into Art Houses. Is that too much to ask for? eh?
VITAL
a film written and directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
New York Asian Film Festival
Sheldrake here, reporting from the 8th Annual Brooklyn International Film Festival at the twos, Second Avenue and Second Street, downtown New York, Lower East Side. I first met Goran Topalovic at the Asia House on Park Avenue for the premiere of APPLESEED. He also produces this festival very year, and he’s the director of the film SAVE THE GREEN PLANET, which wrapped at the Film Forum a couple of weeks ago and which is showing through the States this summer. Completely New York this guy, a mover and shaker just cracking the shell on the egg, he runs a famous website about Asian Cinema called subwaycinema.com. That’s also where you can find the film festival schedule of events. If what I saw last night means anything, I’ve got a big week ahead of me.
Before each screening there are prize giveaways, and last night AICN was pleased to help out Goran by handing out the prizes to winners. Especially fun was handing out the posters that had a quotes from AICN promoting the movie!
So, like, ANNOUNCEMENT: On the 21st at the showing of GODZILLA FINAL WARS, Ain’t It Cool News will be there giving away 20 AICN branded t-shirts in an Asian Movie trivia contest!
These’re great black heavy-duty tee’s with a big cartoon of Travis Bickle Harry on the front and, uhh, Tribeca Film Festival on the back. They got here a little late for the TFF, but in plenty of time for this cool downtown gathering. Here are two of the movies I saw there last night.
VITAL is a movie by Shinya Tsukamoto, long known as a maker of great creep-out movies in the David Cronenberg body-horror genre (Tetsou springs to mind) and a maker of great frenetically photographed movies in general (Bullet Ballet, Tokyo Fist, Gemini). In his other movies Tsukamoto has wrapped the body in dirt, metal and wounds, but this time he goes deep into the body itself…the body made flesh. In VITAL, a medical student, Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano, who’s in at least three movies at this festival as the star, and has maybe twenty minutes of dialog total for all three pictures), has had a car accident and now has amnesia. Still, in anatomy class, that girl he’s unpeeling on the dissection table looks AWFULLY familiar…are you SURE we haven’t met before? In some past life, perhaps. Let me take your skin off, maybe I’ll recognize you then…and so we wander into Flitcraft territory. Remember that story-within-the-story from THE MALTESE FALCON? The book, not the movie. Sam Spade relates the story of an ordinary guy named Flitcraft walking down the street, on his way back to the dealership after a round of golf, when from high atop a skyscraper a steel beam falls in front of him, missing him by maybe an inch. And it feels to him as if the lid has been lifted off life and he’s seen the works inside. The vital organs. The vital. La vie. See?
One of the first scenes shows the actress Kiki, playing another medical student in his class, rejecting a lover; they’re standing maybe fifteen feet apart, she’s in profile and won’t look at him, it’s open space between them—and they’re talking on cell phones. I loved this image of alienation between men and women. She’s dumping him, her professor, and he doesn’t want to break up, and she’s not the ‘splainin’ kind. Basically, she tells him, hey, life sucks. I like somebody else. So he kills himself. Even through the funeral this doesn’t really bother her. Hey, life sucks. But when she starts digging into the body of the cadaver she’d dissecting for medical class, NOW she starts to feel some human sympathy for the formerly distraught dead man. Isn’t that always the way?
Then the movie kinks out, when it shows the couple practicing sexual strangulation with each other. Sheldrake, who’s only really into the loving-and-caring sort of sex thing when it’s for real (and when the anti-anxiety medicines are kicking in—Clonazepam is your friiiieeend), stuck it out, and it turns out the strangulations are there to solve a standard problem in story –writing – if you’re going to have some now-he’s-in-a-parallel-reality story B happening, and you can’t use the ion storm screwing with the transporter solution, how do you get the character from reality A to B and back again. In this case, the strangulations, mimicking nearness to death, brings the Hiroshi, mon amour, closer to death. So they trigger the transitions into the P.U.
What’s in the P.U.? The girl on the table, alive and kicking and dancing and generally doing things a dead girl shouldn’t be doing. Turns out, yup, he knew her all right: she was his lover. And then, ladies and gentlemen, this master of the macabre, horror movie laugher effect here, takes him back into the dissection room…it’s a job…it’s his duty…it must be done…and if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly. But that’s not the way we do things here at Horishi’s University Hospital. We do it slowly over a period of…am I remembering correctly—four MONTHS in the movie? I don’t see how that could be, but that’s what I seem to remember. Geez, that’s a long time to spend with a dead ex-girlfriend. Better you just let her go, Jack. If that old watch isn’t working, better you just get yourself a new watch.
This movie’s a great flirtation with death and sex and love. It’s a profound piece, and points out the terrible difficulty in letting go of someone we care about, even when we know they’re Just Not There anymore. Some of us do it better than others. Now, let me see, where DID I put that bottle of Clonzapem…
NOTE: I also saw A Snake of June, a second Shinya Tsukamoto movie, that was just as brilliant and oriented towards the body and wonderfully frank and accepting in its account of human sexuality, while also being quite dark and scary and fetishistic. It’s a 2002 movie, so all I’ll do here is recommend it: if you get a chance to see it, see it: but if you have a date that’s freaked out by depicted sex, don’t take her. Or him. Or, buzzzzz, it.
Sheldrake
NY,NY
June 2005
