Direction: Takashi Miike
Country: Japan
The filmmaking style of Japanese auteur Takashi Miike doesn’t fit standard molds and conventions. However, and despite the classically twisted backbone of his latest work, First Love, he takes a more archetypal approach as he tells the story of a promising, if hopeless, down-on-his-luck boxer (Masataka Kubota) who bumps into a fragile woman (Sakurako Konishi) turned into a prostitute by the Yakuza. Inspired by the idea of Muneyuki Kii, who also produces, deft screenwriter Masa Nakamura (The Bird People in China) devises an exhilarating one-night ride into the mundane circumstances of contemporary Tokyo. There, you will find Chinese and Japanese triads clashing for power, greedy gangsters (Shota Sometani, Seiyo Uchino), a corrupt cop (Nao Omori), and a determined female assassin (Mami Fujioka).
And this boundless universe of crime is enriched with guns, swords, punches, and a furious driving scene where “trust in Japanese cars” is advertised before a brief yet colorful animated section appears before your eyes. The humor is taken to the limit and the film is infused with hilarious pranks - can you imagine a dying guy having to deal with an unexpected hard-on?
Thus, Miike’s inventive genius is still present, including his obsession for violent and dark contexts to satirize a sickening society, but the film doesn’t match the brilliant weirdness of some of his previous flicks. As expected, the romance was not as wild as the action, and the lurid aesthetics never compensate the overstuffness of the plot. It’s a visceral experience, nonetheless.
