Vital

I normally watch films with no expectations or anticipation of what they have to offer but I wish I'd done some background reading on "Vital" before I settled down to view it. Expecting a horror film, I was left disappointed. Described as a thriller, I didn't find "Vital" particularly thrilling or attention grabbing.

While the film is beautifully shot, the movie relies on mood to keep the viewer engaged with what is unrolling on the screen. In the end, though, it's a somewhat confusing meditation on death and left me feeling more than a little frustrated.

6 out of 10. This is a stylish entry in Asian cinema but it lacks substance. I've no doubt it will delight some viewers but it will frustrate in equal measure.

After a tragic car accident where his girlfriend Ryôko Ooyama (Nami Tsukamoto) died, Hiroshi Takagi (Tadanobu Asano) suffers amnesia with his memories completely blanked. When he sees a book about dissection, he decides to join the medical school with the support of his parents. In the dissection class, his group participates of the autopsy of a young woman, and while cutting apart the tissue, he partially recalls his accident. Later, when he sees a tattoo in the arm of the corpse, he discloses that she was his girlfriend and becomes obsessed to go further in the examination of the body.

This is the first work of director Shinya Tsukamoto that I have had the chance to watch, and I liked very much what I saw. This weird, original and fascinating story is disclosed in an adequate pace and supported by wonderful work of camera and lighting. The central lead cast trio, with Tadanobu Asano, Nami Tsukamoto and Kiki, together with the supportive cast, have also great performances. I intend to see this movie again in a near future, since I saw a DVD spoken in Japanese with English subtitles and therefore I may have missed details on the magnificent image. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Not Available"

It seems the majority of people who see Shinya Tsukamoto films are people who are fans of his to begin with. I am definitely a fan and have seen almost all his films - "Bullet Ballet", "A Snake of June", "Tokyo Fist", "Tetsuo 1&2". Tsukamoto is one of my favorite directors. In my opinion, he towers above most other film makers. His style is totally unconventional and he tends to make movies that can't easily be categorized, so fan-boy types tend to ignore him as overly "artsy", while lovers of more lush, slow-moving Japanese films tend to see him as overly frenetic and violent. Plot and linear narrative is typically incidental in favor of emotional catharsis (his films rarely wrap themselves up neatly, if at all - which can infuriate people). He tends to find a subject and fetishize it (guns in "Bullet Ballet", voyerism in "A Snake of June", metal and machinery in "Tetsuo", physical strength in "Tokyo Fist") rather than follow a standard "he did this, she did that" plot thread.

I would call "Vital" his warmest film to date. This is clearly a more toned down and relaxed Tsukamoto. Perhaps a sign of the director's move toward middle-age. There is very little of the manic hand-held camera work and thundering music from his earlier films. It's mostly static, beautifully framed images of non-moving people. Almost like paintings. Gone also is the furious video scramble editing technique that was taken to such wild extremes in "Bullet Ballet" and "Tetsuo".

The plot involves a young man recovering from amnesia after a car accident, who enters med school only to find the first cadaver he dissects is his old girlfriend (who died in the car crash). The memories start coming back to him, but the young med student (having no memory or reference point for the memories) instead begins to treat them as daydreams, and possible realities.

It sounds creepier than it actually is. The film is basically a love story, and quite a wistful one at that.

Highly recommended.

Vital contains a single scene of such true, deep, tearjerking, aching love that despite all of its sleepy subtleties, it is truly great cinema. This scene makes you cry and relate to it, and only one who's ever been in deep, heavy, painful love with someone can watch it and understand what I mean. It's such stirring drama in one shot lasting about 5 minutes between two people, and you want that scene to last forever. I haven't felt any kind of emotion like that from a movie in God knows how long.

There isn't much else to say about this film. Somehow, Tsukamoto has made a film so powerful based on one scene that is more emotional and moving than any work I've seen in nearly a year from many much much less dry filmmakers.

I think whoever listed this as a "thriller" was going by the plot description rather than the actual film, in which an amnesiac medical student spends several months dissecting his ex-girlfriend at the University. The student is taciturn, is followed around by another, infatuated medical student, and because to have memories of his ex. And that's pretty much the movie. It is deliberately paced and at times purposely opaque.

The director has at times a film students fondness for meaningless composition, notably in an early scene in which the students parents stand perfectly still and converse. This sort of statues-holding-deadpan-conversations work well in Hal Hartley movies, but they feel a bit pretentious without Hartley's humor. The opening jittery camera-work also seems like something a film student would do. This sort of thing put me off, but the movie did generally keep my interest, becoming slightly more involving and less pretentious as it progressed, and in the end I feel okay about sitting through it, although I can't say I'd give it a strong recommendation.