Shuffle

This extremely hectic and nearly headache-inducing short by the Japanese punk demigod Sogo Ishii is definitely one of the craziest and most experimental art-house movies I ever had the pleasure of seeing on a big screen (during a special revolving on the director). After the two hugely different but already influential long-feature films "Panic High School" and "Crazy Thunder Road", Ishii finally made the punk-short he clearly dreamed of making ever since the beginning. "Shuffle" is based on comic strip and doesn't really have a story to tell. The camera just very creatively follows a man as he's running out of his apartment and down the streets. He's running from the cops, because he murdered his girlfriend, but he's also running towards the pimp who stole her from him, for vengeance. 30 minutes of playtime only to depict a man running down some streets seems long, but Ishii somehow manages to make it fascinating by presenting a non-stop series of imaginative camera tricks, lighting techniques and unique sound-editing. The visuals are groundbreaking and far ahead of their time. The colors continuously fade out and back in, the camera is put in every possible perspective there is and the music is really loud and stimulating. "Shuffle" often looks like an exercise for Ishii's next big project "Burst City" and it definitely was a great source of influence for future Asian filmmakers like Takashi Miike and Shinya Tsukamoto. You can't really call it a great film, because there are almost no dialogs or character drawings, but it surely guarantees half a hour of adrenalin-rushing spectacle.

I'm not sure charming is the right word to use to describe Shuffle, seeing as how dark a few parts of it are, but it's low-budget and really feels like it was made with a great deal of youthful, maybe even student energy, and not necessarily in a bad way. A large chunk of it involves one man chasing another for an obscenely long time, with it fluctuating between being funny and exciting in interesting ways. Some of the camerawork done for these long bursts of action did genuinely impress me, though.

There's more to it than that, but I felt it was more keen on being surreal and provocative than it was on providing a good deal of context for the action-focused stuff that really mattered. I therefore can't say I liked this from start to finish, but I did love the start, and it grabbed my attention a few more times before the finish.

For a grimy burst of action and crime, clocking in at the unusual runtime of 35 minutes, you could do so much worse, if you could even do anything else at all. This is too short to be a feature film, but very long by short film standards. Maybe there should be more films that occupy runtimes between 30 and 40 minutes, especially if they're willing to do gonzo and oftentimes entertaining things as confidently as Shuffle.

Gakuryu Ishii's Shuffle is mostly just a short exercise in style if nothing else. Often extremely hectic and practically headache-inducing, it lacks any form of narrative or characterisation, Shuffle instead concentrates on two intercutting and unfocused subplots that ultimately amount to very little. Adapted from the legendary Katsuhiro Otomo's short manga, Run, although Ishii never actually asked for permission until after the film had been shot, go figure. Granted, the exhaustingly long chase through the Japanese streets which make up the majority of the film is shot in wild, semi-abstract patterns so that you're never quite sure what you're seeing and backed by a repetitive if memorable industrial synth score. You can certainly feel the influence Ishii's punk stylings would have on more modern Japanese cinema but I just wish there was a bit more meat on Shuffle's bones to make me fall in love with its underground grim.