Hey folks, Harry here... Mr Beaks has luckily been blessed to see BATTLE ROYALE, the best film that won't be released in the miserable friggin United States in 2001 or ever... But here is another look, but by the man who can get things done.... Mr Beaks...
As honestly and clearly as possible, think back on your adolescence. Consider the life-or-death nature of crushes, the isolation that spurred a retreat into music as mopey as Morrissey or The Cure, or as rage-fueled as Pantera or Metallica, and wonder why it should be that melodrama is considered anathema when it comes to depicting cinematically the rigors of nascent adulthood. Back in 1986, when critics decried the overwrought, too-knowing dialogue in Stand By Me, I remember feeling – being on the cusp of entering the strange world of 7th Grade myself – that these kids were struggling with the same fears and frustrations that I was facing, and addressing them with a sophistication that wasn’t at all beyond my grasp.
Nevertheless, un-ironic depictions of young adulthood remain subject to critical scorn, which has meant rough passage for Lea Pool’s Lost & Delirious. Set in the bucolic Great White North, Pool’s film is an earnest, at times painfully so, account of two teenaged boarding school roommates, Paulie and Tori, who have fallen madly, unconditionally in love with each other to the point where they can’t see clear to classify their relationship as homosexual. When confronted with a new roommate, Mouse, the girls simply laugh off their brazen, nightly trysts, which at first startle Mouse, but soon prove soothing in their regularity.
It is Tori who invokes the comparison to the Lost Boys, and the dreamily shot campus does seem a sort of Neverland; however, with a boys school close by, and Tori’s nosy little sister poking about, the young lovers’ idyll is simply not fated to last forever. Once the entire school becomes privy to Paulie and Tori’s relationship, Tori, fearful of her family’s reaction, pulls back, choosing to make herself available to a suitor from the nearby boys school. Paulie reacts by first delving into the heightened romanticism of Antony and Cleopatra, though her Shakespeare infatuation takes a decidedly dark turn when she finds empowering Lady MacBeth’s Act 1, Scene 5 monologue in which she seeks deific aid in summoning up the courage to commit murder.
Critics such as Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times have described Paulie’s impassioned utterances as "laughable," which is disturbing, considering that there are other more readily apparent flaws to single out; namely, Pool’s predilection for the music of Michelle Me’Shell Ndege’ocello and Ani DiFranco to provide lyrical buttressing of the film’s themes, or Mouse’s oft-intrusive narration. Paulie’s appropriation of Shakespearean verse, however, to express her heartbreak is not at all incongruous in the world of Pool’s film, and while it is difficult to observe Paulie’s worsening mental state, her dialogue is never alienating unless the viewer’s own personal baggage intercedes.
That said, this whole endeavor could have been a disaster had the three leads been filled by less capable actresses. Those who couldn’t understand the buzz for last year’s "It" girl, Piper Perabo, need only check out her work here to see her in fine, flamboyant form as Paulie. She handles the young woman’s mood swings with remarkable verve, never once striking a false note, even when the script let’s her down with tending to one of the film’s overt symbols (she finds, and nurses back to health, a wounded hawk.) Also impressive is Jessica Pare, saddled with the difficult, unsympathetic role of Tori, while Mischa Barton (the dead girl hiding under the bed in The Sixth Sense) is suitably awkward as the abandoned Mouse.
Remember that life-or-death stuff earlier in the review? It may serve as metaphor in discussing a film like Lost & Delirious, but it’s frighteningly literal in Kinji Fukasaku’s highly controversial Battle Royale, which just received its New York City premiere last Friday night with a sold out screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Fukasaku’s film, which posits a future where kids have become so unruly that the government has instituted the "BR" Program, which mandates that, once a year, the worst ninth grade class will be rounded up and sent off to a deserted island for three days of hand-to-hand combat. The kicker here is that there can only be one survivor; otherwise, everyone is dispatched by way of a radio-controlled collar outfitted with a detonator (much like in The Running Man.)
The film plunges us into the madness of this scenario along with the children, and we learn the ground rules of the "game" from their former seventh grade teacher, Kitano (played, appropriately enough, by the inimitable "Beat" Takeshi Kitano). As would be expected, there is initial resistance and hostility to being thrust into such a dire situation, but the protestations are swiftly quelled when Kitano stages a nifty demonstration of the aforementioned collars. At this point, the class is also introduced to a pair of slightly older, silently intimidating ringers, one of whom, Kawada (Taro Yamamoto), has volunteered to a second go-round on the island, while the other, the malevolent Kiriyama (Masanobu Ando), has signed up merely for fun.
With the ground rules established, the children are given rations and one randomly, pre-selected weapon (ranging in lethalness from semi-automatics to a cooking pot lid,) and sent out onto the island. Some children immediately band together in an effort to find a peaceful way out of their predicament, but others accept the kill-or-be-killed mandate, and go about their business with varying degrees of success. Clearly, we are meant to sympathize with Shuya and Noriko (Tatsuya Fujiwara and Aki Maeda,) but the true protagonist of the piece is Kawada, who sees in the young lovers striking similarities to his own, tragic experience in playing the game, the residual guilt from which has forced him back onto the island. Whether or not he means to spare them is another question entirely.
Surprisingly, it has been Fukasaku’s tendency toward melodrama, rather than the graphic violence, that has soured viewers and critics alike on Battle Royale, but it is from this straightforward presentation that the film derives its power, making it a truly dangerous and subversive piece of cinema. While some of the awkward dialogue may be the result of a bad translation, at its worst, it isn’t that far removed from how teenagers often express deeply felt emotions. As in Lost & Delirious, adolescence is depicted as a period in which every little personal tragedy takes on epic, life-altering meaning, which lends an authenticity to the bold proclamations of love and friendship, even if, in this case, it’s in the context of an unthinkable bloodsport.
Both of these films have the misfortune to surface in a highly cynical era where melodrama has fallen out of favor, and while societal attitudes seem to be shifting (I mean, half of this country did vote for Bush,) we still seem to be a nation unwilling to deal with the sappy stuff, even when rendered with a Grand Guignol edge (e.g. Hannibal,) which spells certain doom for a couple of flawed, but emotionally honest, works. In Lost & Delirious, Paulie repeatedly exhorts "rage more!" To that, I’d like to add "smirk less!"
Faithfully submitted
MrBeaks
P.S. For those of you who can handle the sap, check out Criterion’s newly released Douglas Sirk dramas, Written on the Wind and All That Heaven Allows. If you’re ever going to have a tolerance for the stuff, this is the place to start.
