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Vital (2004)

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

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From Time Out London

It is tempting to trace a sentimental education on Shinya Tsukamoto’s part from the full-on Cronenberg ‘body-horror’ of ‘Tetsuo’, through ‘Tokyo Fist’ to ‘Snake of June’. True, newcomers may still find ‘Vital’ extreme; its story of an amnesiac trainee-doctor’s obsessive (and intimate) four-month relationship with a cadaver he’s dissecting – which, by ‘supernatural’ coincidence, happens to be that of his ex-girlfriend, killed in a carcrash he survived – is replete enough with gloopy, close-up, gory innards, disorientating, industrial-level noise, sado-masochistic shenanigans, and eerie, hallucinatory atmospherics. It’s also true that Tsukamoto’s taste for an alienating use of both red and blue colour filters, temporal jump-cuts and the visual exploration of body/matter interfaces has little diminished. But here, the brooding, mostly silent presence of Tadanobu Asano (the handsome bodyguard from Takeshi Kitano's ‘Zatôichi’), as the student, personalises the film’s own at once agonising and wistful interrogation of matters of love, spiritual connection and physical being. Some may find Tsukamoto’s film posey – the life-force symbolised as a dance on the beach – and be frustrated by his clear lack of interest in traditional narrative, but it’s a hypnotic and often severely beautiful anatomy all the same.

Author: WH 2005-09-27 12:35:27

Time Out London Issue 1832: September 28-October 5 2005