Shinya Tsukamoto's Body Ballet

[syegul@winmag.com]

Culled this review from elsewhere online -- hope you all find it interesting.

BULLET BALLET

While a little less frenetic and confusing than the "body-horror" of Tetsuo
I+II, BB is still very much a Shinya Tsukamoto film: intense and weird. It seems
that ST is heading in a direction where further emphasis is put upon the
psychological depth of the characters. In this development, Tokyo Fist seemed to
be the natural transition unto BB. It might disappoint some after seeing the
Tetsuos, but basically its a more brainy film. The themes remain intact, though:
obsession and fetichism is still very much in center. It also scores very high
in coolnes, methinks!

As Goda, -played by ST himself-, returns home and finds his home swarmed by
police, and his girlfriend dead, he refuses to believe it a suicide. The hunt
for an explanation quickly deterioates into and obsession about guns, where
Goda, who is working in the advertisement business, starts making his own videos
of explosions, handguns and the like. He tries to build his own handgun, and as
he fails, start hunting through the Tokyo (?) underground, trying to buy a gun.

(This hunt for a gun smacks of Kurosawas? Stray Dog, but it could just be me,
since I saw this one recently).

He encounters a streetgang, and becomes somewhat romantically interested in one
of its members; a girl with a serious deathwish. Even though he and the girl are
inexplicably linked by similar scars, they degrade him, but still allow him to
hang around. When someone starts killing the members of the gang, he becomes
their protector, and everything ends up in a Taxi Driver-like finale.

Shot in black and white, the movie carries the "trademarks" of ST, namely the
handheld camera chase-scenes, the dark and seedy image of the big city, and the
intense industrial music. Sort of noir meets cyberpunk meets a
fetisch/transgressive film. I feel that ST still hasn?t dried out these themes,
and even though he?s already made quite a number of films (which I haven?t seen,
sadly), I still think his got something up his sleeve. If you like movies that
doesn?t spell out everything for you, this is it. 3 1/2 of 5