Rating: 4/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2024 | 30/52 | Shinya Tsukamoto
The first seconds of the movie immediately tell you that you are watching a Shinya Tsukamoto movie. Ten dudes stand equidistant in a boxing ring, performing choreographed punching and dodging. The camera shakes violently as it passes across each man. A fist punches the screen, creating a gory hole where the fist has presumably opened your skull.
Tsuda goes door-to-door selling his firm’s consulting service. While passing an office, he sees a room full of boxing men. The stairwell is full of bruised men recovering and resting. As he passes one man, the man chases after Tsuda. It’s Kojima, a friend from high school.
Back home, Tsuda collapses on his fiancée Hizuru’s lap. Hizuru stopped working when they got engaged. The stress of supporting them both is killing Tsuda. When Tsuda returns home, he finds Kojima and Hizuru chatting. He doesn’t know how Kojima found him.
While Tsuda continues to flop sweat through life, Kojima comes by the apartment when Tsuda isn’t around to visit with Hizuru. He tries to come on to Hizuru, but she tells him to fuck off. Still, when Tsuda finds out, he punches a hole in the wall. He finds where Kojima lives and tries to fight him, but Kojima moves faster than Tsuda can comprehend. His punches send blood flying everywhere like an anime.
This scene changes Hizuru. She breaks things off with Tsuda over dinner when he cannot stop asking about what’s happening between her and Kojima. She moves in with Kojima and gives herself intense piercings and tattoos, craving the pain it causes her.
To win Hizuru back, Tsuda takes up boxing. In doing so, he continues a chain that Tsuda and Kojima started years ago.
— What’s Kojima to you? — I wouldn’t mind if he beats me to death.
The film has a fractal quality, where scenes are brief and time passes between each rapidly. It feels less like a linear story than circling a drain. The movie pulses between moments of quiet contemplation and eruptions of intensity and violence.
On paper, the film could look like an un-ironic Fight Club. But this isn’t about the seductive nature of self-destruction. It’s about the violence required to find your identity in a world that does everything possible to reduce you to nothing. Especially in Japan, conformity is expected and praised. Hizuru getting a tattoo might be the most transgressive act in the film. Tsuda wants to help her cover it up, but that’s the wrong lesson. Accepting her evolution is crucial for him to win her back.
Kaori Fujii as Hizuru is by far the best part of this movie. Her performance conveys the intensity of body transformation more than the boys’ boxing.
The middle part of the movie lags in places. But the film is so short, and the structure is so chaotic that it doesn’t hinder it much. It’s worth it to get to the climactic fight.
The content I would warn anyone about is Tsuda passing a decomposing cat, where maggots are eating through its chest and face.
Oh, and Chu Ishikawa’s score rules.