I've only just remembered about a great eligible film, Shinya Tsukamoto's
Bullet Ballet from 1998. The film expands upon themes from Tsukamoto's previous films (alienation, self destructive urges, fetishisation of weaponry, the difficulty of love or any other connection between two people) by setting it in a more realistic world than his previous sci-fi/horror themed films. Tokyo Fist from 1995 which came before seems to have been the transition film taking themes of bodily mutation from the Tetsuo films and moving them into more 'real world' areas of piercing and boxing, but even this film had the protagonist and his girlfriend being inducted into the strange world of boxing clubs and a love triangle by the return of an old schoolfriend, a world frightening in a different way from the couple's coldly inhumane urban environment (the split between the fleshy, sweaty, sexual world of the boxer and the sterile, cold, high rise world of the couple at the beginning of the film sort of makes Tokyo Fist into Tsukamoto's Crash. Although similar imagery was used in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer which Tokyo Fist makes a good matched pair with - the homoerotic shots of body builders in Tetsuo II gives way to a bleak, blue tinged technological landscape (where a literal nuclear family regins supreme!) and is then played out in reverse in the later film as the characters in a sense regain their humanity, and individuality, against an alienated backdrop). A Snake of June also returned to this idea of an outsider upending a vaguely troubled and unconnecting, but still ticking along, relationship with shattering but also liberating consequences. Tsukamoto himself often played these disruptive outsider figures in the films - often seeming frightening and omnisciently powerful with access to forbidden knowledge at first but soon revealed as being as downtrodden and pathetically vulnerable as the main characters, just with a twisted way of responding to their downtrodden state (whether it is transforming oneself into a human/metal hyrbid monster in Tetsuo, pummelling himself into oblivion in Tokyo Fist, or stalking and trying to sexually liberate the telephone operator who helped with the suicidal tendencies of the cancer sufferer in A Snake Of June)
However Bullet Ballet takes these same ideas and keeps them extremely grounded. The Tsukamoto character who is normally the mysterious peripheral character in the other films becomes the principle figure in this one, playing an advertising executive called Goda who returns home one evening to find his girlfriend has committed suicide for no apparent reason. He becomes obsessed with why she did it and wanting to own a gun, maybe to commit suicide himself or simply just to understand her final actions more clearly by holding a similar weapon to the one she used to kill herself. The initial section of the film focuses on his attempts to get hold of a gun, from surreptitiously paying a criminal for one (but being conned out of his cash for a toy gun weighted with sand!), to trying to build one himself, before finally being provided with the real thing by a mysterious foreign woman in exchange for marrying her so she can stay in the country legally.
This runs parallel with another story strand of a bunch of young gang members trying to prove themselves and move up in their organisation. Their activities are initially violent but childish acts - the one female member Chisato has a death wish stunt of standing on the edge of subway station platforms as trains pass by. The gang initially encounters Goda in an alley and viciously beat him while finding Goda's own lack of concern for his safety, almost numbed following his girlfriend's death, amusing. However the gang paradoxically save Goda because instead of following a suicidal path he moves towards seeking revenge on the gang, initially with his homemade gun, which fails to work properly when he confronts Chisato and the gang leader in an alley behind their nightclub hangout. Beaten again Goda limps away from the scene.
When the gang leader is told by his superior to kill a local policeman in a display of loyalty, the young man remembers Goda's gun and steals it to perform the act, leading to Goda chasing across town to get his gun back before the crime is committed after being alerted to the fact by Chisato. As he runs there and back Chisato herself shows her growing fascination with Goda's lack of fear of death that matches her own by doing a Faye Wong in Chungking Express style tour of his apartment. The pair begin a tenuous relationship but less as potential lovers than as a kind of uncommunicative father and rebellious daughter, while Goda is getting pulled more into the gang's activities as he intervenes during a fight between rival gangs - taking the opportunity to put his violent feelings to a practical and cathartic purpose.
Eventually the gang's childish hijinks have severe consequences in a plotline that touches on elements from Tokyo Fist as one member after talking to a friend in the gym who tells him proudly of the training he is doing for his big boxing match and the great career he has planned out in front of him, casually shoots the boxer. The anger of those abandoned by the world and driven into the underworld gangs or from the mainstream of society feel towards those people who seem to have gotten all the breaks is a big theme of the film - whether it is Goda's ordered life being thrown into disarray by his girlfriend's inexplicable, and maybe preventable, suicide at the beginning of the film; the anger the gang leader feels towards the young policeman he sets out to shoot who has a decent career and family and who looks down on him as being nothing; the same guy's embarrassment at going behind the gang's back and applying for a job at Goda's old advertising agency; or Chisato's despairing look near the end of the film from the roof of a building at other teenagers her age taking exams which will open doors into society that she will never have access to.
Unfortunately the boxer who was killed had connections and someone takes it upon themselves to start killing off everyone within the gang. The film climaxes with Goda aligning himself with the gang at their hideout as they fearfully wait for the arrival of the mysterious killer, who turns out to be the boxer's grandfather, a veteran of the Second World War (someone who experienced real warfare rather than the more childishly flippant gangland stuff of the younger generations, and tellingly someone of a generation older than Goda himself. This killer is played in a cameo by Hisashi Igawa, who played Kurogane in Kurosawa's Ran, with all the samurai connotations that brings with it, as well as the sense of a more venerable and honourable mode of filmmaking that has passed). The gang members treating the situation as a game are swiftly dispatched while those who take the life or death situation seriously are spared with only a vicious beating, including Goda and Chisato.
It is a magnificent film, Tsukamoto's best I feel. It deepens themes from his previous films and ties them together into a powerful coherent statment on love and loss and also touches on the rifts between generations, immigration and foreigners in Japan, the contrast between the safe real surface world and the hidden underworld of gang violence and dark alleys and the difficulties of moving back to the official world once you have become immersed in the darker one, the ways that self hatred can express itself as suicidal tendencies or externalised violence, and the ways that dangerous weaponry only intensifies conflicts that weren't particularly intended to have fatal consequences set against the brisk efficiency of someone without a particular interest in the power of violence but simply driven by vengeance.
In a coda that ties in with the theme from earlier Tsukamoto films of the outsider shaking up a flawed but working situation, in this case the violent gang being destroyed, that acts as a kind of cathartic liberation for those who survive, after burning the bodies the wounded Chisato and Goda go their separate ways in opposite directions, at first walking then running faster and faster into an uncertain future.
