BULLET BALLET (1998)
"Kids, don't play bad games. Losers die."
3 out of ****
Starring Shinya Tsukamoto ,Kirina Mano, Hisashi Igawa, Takahiro Murase; Written & Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto; Cinematography by Shinya Tsukamoto
It seems like everyone has a gun in the movies, these days. They carry them, flaunt them, shoot them, and no one blinks an eye. They're a given; they're commonplace. But for those of us who live outside of, say, Texas, guns are not a commonplace, and while it's generally assumed that characters get a hold of their guns somehow, we're not really encouraged to wonder how or why. BULLET BALLET is a film that wonders how and why: how people get guns, and why they need them so much in the first place.
The movie begins with a premise familiar from other recent Japanese movies (cf. THE EEL, SHALL WE DANCE?, THE BIRD PEOPLE OF CHINA): a plain-looking white-collar thirtyish Japanese man finds himself propulsed into a situation that stands his world on its head, that unlocks the cell in which his id, we assume, has long been imprisoned. In BULLET BALLET, the man is Goda (played by writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto), who makes commercials; one day his girlfriend commits suicide, and although Goda doesn't miss a day of work, he is (understandably) deeply traumatized. There are repeated shots of a window in Goda's apartment, pierced by a bullet hole, radiating cracks; similarly, the suicide is like a hole in his head, radiating shards of pain that undermine his sanity.
One day he is beaten by a gang of street punks and subsequently fixates on one of them, sullen gamine Chisato (Kirina Mano). Seeming both to wish to revenge himself upon the gang and to become like them, Goda becomes obsessed with purchasing a gun. He roams the streets, he surfs the Net, he searches, and finds it harder than you might think to acquire one. Why does he want it so badly? We're not sure--to provide an answer would require something akin to characterization, which isn't the film's raison d'être. It's clear, though, that Goda's need for the gun has nothing really to do with being beaten by the gang; they are a pretext, although he displaces his motives onto them.
It seems, ultimately, as if what he really wants is either to lash out at the world for taking his girlfriend or to kill himself for failing her. In the world of BULLET BALLET, both impulses are one and the same: the seduction of destruction is also the appeal of annihilation. There is an astonishing scene in which Chisato stands on tip-toe on the brink of a subway platform, balancing on outstretched arms, as a subway train flashes by. One twitch, and she's dead. She won't throw herself in front of the moving train, but she'll come as close as she can. She, aimless and disaffected like all the characters, both perpetrates violence and courts death until the two become inextricable, until it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance.
BULLET BALLET, then, is a movie about violence as a vicious cycle, as a state of mind, as a manifestation of anger against the world and hatred of the self, which feeds on its own energy. Tsukamoto pulls out all the stops, using jump cuts, freeze frames, fade outs, slow motion, and, most impressively, an inspired use of ambient sound, to sustain a vision of violence as both appealing and appalling. It's all shot with a hand-held camera in harsh black and white which transforms the mundane into the evocative: sun and shadow pass over a Tokyo high-rise rooftop in the rain like a fleeting glimpse of God; an insect crawls across a dead man's face like the embodiment of Death.
In addition to writing and directing, Tsukamoto shot and edited and designed the movie, and he deserves much credit--BULLET BALLET isn't notably coherent or profound, but damn if it doesn't look cool. As in Wong Kar-wai's best work, the hectic disjointed rhythms, the unconventional pacing, and the incongruous flashes of humour mimic the fractured frenetic experience of contemporary urban life; the film speaks to us in the language of our time.
You would think that Tsukamoto's fellow Japanese Beat Takeshi's work had given us the last word on violence as vicious cycle, especially in his VIOLENT COP, but BULLET BALLET is even more extreme in its aestheticization--and fetishization--of violence. In Takeshi's films violence is expressed as a transient disruption of the Taoist still centre which the characters inhabit most of the time, and to which they inevitably return after momentary frenzies of action. The ultimate still centre is of course death--which is where most of Takeshi's characters end up. In BULLET BALLET, however, there is no centre; the characters live on the margins where hurt and risk and degradation are ever-present. Violence is a modus operandi, and its allure is simple: it keeps people too busy to think or reflect. For everyone in this film who has or wants a gun, reflection seems worse than the threat of death.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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