Vital

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.

After the surrealness of the Tetsuo films and the blue filters and voyeurism of Snake of June, I was not sure where Tsukamoto would go with this film. I saw it as part of the London FIlm Festival and it was one of my favourite films.

The story is of a Hiroshi (Asano Tadanobu) suffering from amnesia (as a result of a car crash in which his girlfriend dies) slowly regaining his memory through performing an autopsy on her. It raises questions on the nature of the self and how mutable it is.

For example, Hiroshi was pressured in to becoming a medical student, but he rebelled and became a drifter. After the crash he loses his recent memory, but he is inexplicably drawn to study medicine. Is this the call of his nature or a way of healing? Once the trauma's of teenage years are stripped away and we return to the core of the self before social conditioning steps in, are we more innocent or closer to what we can become? All this may sound very deep, but this film is all about childhood/innocence and the self in my opinion.

Pretty different from the other three films mentioned above, but still has lots of blue/grey filters and an extremely acute sense of sound. Some of the autopsy scenes have some wonderful slurping noises and tension that really set me on edge.

as usual, tadanobu asano provides a subtly seizing performance as a medical student who returns to school from a car accident that killed his gf (an extremely attractive yet horrible dancer). the med student has lost some of his memory, but is searching for answers which arrives in the form of flashbacks. during an autopsy, he discovers that his cadaver is his former gf, and he mentally struggles to regain his composure during a surreal and trippy ride in his mind.

unlike some of the director's earlier works, this film does not spazz out with an inordinate amount of guitar fuzz and headache inducing images (but there are still some bizarre images of smokestacks integrated with migraine inducing punk rock for a few fleeting moments). instead, the film focus on the medical student's more subtle descent into confusion and then enlightenment as he struggles to regain his memory and make peace with himself.

in the midst of the med students flashbacks, another sexually bizarre med student (another extremely attractive woman) courts tadanobu.

if you're squeamish and wouldn't watch HBO's "autopsy" program, then i would not suggest this movie to you.

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.

I was mostly disappointed with this film. I'm a fan of Tsukamoto's other work, and while this film indicates his growth as a director, and has a strong cast, I felt it had issues with pacing, and a pretty dissatisfying ending.

Asano Tadanobu, normally an engaging lead, seems to be coasting through this film, brooding, mainly. Of course, maybe that's how his character was written, but I found myself wondering when it would pick up in several places and unable to identify with him.

Kunimura Jun is wonderfully powerful as Ryoko's father, and I wound up wishing he was more of a central character. I also felt Ittoku Kishibe, who can conjure a truly menacing screen presence, was rather wasted as Dr. Kashiwabuchi.

There are some interesting philosophical questions raised, but they are never really addressed or explored fully. I guess I'm also getting tired of the "I don't know whether I'm dreaming or awake" cliché in many movies in this genre. Plus, it's a little ham-fisted to have a character just come out and say that.

Vital contains a few interesting scenes involving a dance, and some of Tsukamoto's signature music video-style strangeness in a few places, but in summary, a slow, dark film with no real scares or thrills.