Tokyo Blood

This Gakuryu Ishii film is a few different stories that play out in a not-quite-feature-length runtime. But Tokyo Blood is a good deal longer than most short films, since it kind of feels like four different short films in one.

The first story is about a man who just snaps one day and then he runs through the city, possibly at the speed of all the vehicles around him. There is no dialogue. It gets things off in an experimental direction, for obvious reasons.

The second story has two young girls hanging out and riding around on a bike, and parts of it looked like some of the locations in Perfect Days, the Wim Wenders film from a couple of years ago. Had some deja vu. There were also bikes at one stage in that, from memory. Anyway, the story is odd but kind of striking - a little eerie and somehow nostalgic at the same time.

The third story is called Hole. It's very green. Made me think of The Matrix. A man keeps saying "hole," and not much else, and he's joined by two other people who go looking for the hole he means. They see lots of holes in Tokyo but struggle. I like how it feels obvious and nonsensical simultaneously. It's funny at first and then turns towards horror.

The fourth short moves away from the Tokyo thing. It's a sort of apocalyptic story done on a budget and with a detached style, reminding me a bit of a Peter Greenaway film called The Falls that I don't know how I found the time to watch a couple of years back. It was very good, but also super repetitive and like three hours long.

But Tokyo Blood, it's pretty cool. The fourth story is a bit of a letdown, and #1, though cool, doesn't have as much to offer as #2 and #3, but I liked spending 33 minutes watching this overall.

If you've ever watched an Ishii film before and I'm guessing you have because one does not simply stumble upon Tokyo Blood, you'll know the obsession the director has with landscape. Frames and frames of beautiful but kinetic images often coming together are a key element of his work. This short anthology film that combines four stories of seemingly unrelated people showcase Ishii's love of image but also his love and fear of Tokyo, it's sprawling streets and wonderful vistas, but also it's relationship to it's people, seen in the second story, perhaps the most beautiful one. Narratively, excluding the heart of stone segment that bases itself upon a futurist "what if" scenario of the necessity of a return to nature, the film portrays the alienation and claustrophobia of the city through involuntary individualism in the first segment and the societal need to break down and escape in the third. This is a beautiful film, but beyond surface levels does not delve into themes that his later works such as "Angel Dust" or his previous works such as "Electric Dragon 80,000v" did.