Battle Royale

So, you thought your schooldays were tough? We have had cinematic portraits of adults vs. schoolkids before -- Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and Lindsay Anderson’s If… come to mind -- but there has never been a indictment of school-age life quite like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. In addition to it being the bloodiest of dramas and blackest of satires, Battle Royale is perhaps the most passionate and crazed cinematic declaration of solidarity with a younger generation ever presented on a movie screen.

As wildly popular with young audiences as it was threatening to parliamentarians when released in Japan a year ago, Battle Royale plays a limited run this weekend at Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario. Since it has so far frightened off every North American distributor, it is likely to be confined to the film society/cinematheque circuit for a while longer. But as so often happens, its suppression will likely both add to its cachet and affirm its political stance.

Battle Royale is a fever-pitched exercise in the theory that reality itself is so close to absurdity that you need twist your picture of it only slightly to send it over the edge into nightmarish satire. In this picture, a class of 42 grade-nine students is kidnapped by state authorities, shipped to a deserted island, and thrown into a for-keeps game of Survivor where they must kill each other until there is only one of them left. If more than one student is still alive after three days, every survivor will be killed. Any resemblance between this process and everyday life for a young person in Japan is absolutely intended.

Battle Royale ever-so-slightly stretches the rules of the already tortuous Japanese educational game so that student life now explicitly becomes a matter of life and death. Life on the island is a school day with weapons; where the intercom recites the morning’s body count to the strains of Strauss’s Radetzky March, and an audiovisual presentation is a videotape of a chirpy young Japanese hostess explaining the island’s deadly rules as if she were explaining a game of twister to a band of summer campers.

The schoolyard bully now finds himself in his dream environment, petty schoolgirl’s arguments are settled with guns, and small groups of frightened students huddle together to survive until they’re brutally reminded that the rules of the game rule out any attempts at solidarity. Some respond with denial (“If I survive, I’ll go to a good school” one fantasizes), but more often the response is nihilism. “What’s wrong with killing?” one student argues. “Everybody’s got their reasons!”

This is not exactly an attitude designed to make educators and parliamentarians feel comfortable, and in general, Battle Royale displays a level of cultural self-examination that would be impossible in an American film -- the closest thing to it in recent American cinema is probably Larry Clark’s Bully. Both films are portraits of the near hopelessness of teen life, but in place of Clarks’ unconditional surrender to despair, Battle Royale concludes that defiance in the face of evil is a viable attitude, and that rebellion -- even if hopeless -- is the only sane act for a young person.

It’s probably simply the raw bloody enthusiasm with which the director makes his point that has disturbed officialdom. The 70 year-old Fukasaku made his name in Yakuza pictures thirty years ago, and Battle Royale is presented with an energy that makes John Woo feel like Antonioni, and an operatic passion that would make Martin Scorsese blush. It skates about the edge of exploitation and feels just slightly immoral. But it is also the new milennium’s first great teen movie: It kicks you in the stomach, but it points to a way of survival.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001

Hana Bi

Takeshi Kitano, who is virtually unknown in North America, is Japan’s biggest media personality. Since 1973 he has parlayed a career in standup comedy into seven current TV shows, half-a-dozen regular newspaper columns and 55 books. From 1990 to 1995 he was chosen “favorite TV celebrity” in a nationwide poll, and in 1994 picked (by the same people, presumably) as the man the electorate would most like to see as Prime Minister.

Not surprisingly, he has moved into movies as well. Starting in 1989 with Violent Cop—a film that makes Dirty Harry look like Frasier—he has gone on to direct (and for the most part, star in) seven films. Two of them get a wide North American release this month, thus making us privileged in a way Japanese cinemagoers were not: we get to start with his finest and most mature work.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Takeshi makes gangster movies. He also makes cop movies, and he makes movies where it’s sometimes hard to tell the virtues of one from the virtues of the other. They are films about the honourable life and a good death, and how for cop or yakuza one is usually a part of the other. In Fireworks he’s the cop—although by now such details are probably decided at the script stage by the flip of a coin.

He’s a cop for whom guilt seems the primary driving emotion as well. Yoshitaka Nishi is a man in the midst of losing everything that gives his life meaning: his daughter has just died; his wife is dying of cancer; one of his partners has been killed and another crippled in a bungled stakeout; his job in jeopardy and he’s in hock up to his eyeballs to the yakuza. Nishi’s reaction is novel: he decides to rob a bank so he and his wife can enjoy one last vacation together.

This kind of idea could make a really hideous American comedy-drama—in fact it probably already has—but here it emerges as a story of love and death told with simplicity, elegance, heart and—oddly—humour. This is a very funny movie, especially taking into account the genuine gravity of the proceedings just described. As a director, Takeshi seems to draw on his roots in standup comedy, although as an actor one takes his past as a comic on faith—his face is so impassively stony that you worry a smile might tear it in half. Yet his inscrutability is the key to his filmmaking.

Takeshi makes the simplest movies in the world, and his secret would be well learned by a lot of American filmmakers. What it consists of, quite simply, is the courage to do almost nothing; of having faith in the audience to read into the movie what you need them to. He often gets points across with static images of peoples faces; just turning the camera on and leaving it there for longer than you expect. There’s something very Japanese about this—holding a simple medium shot of an actor and pulling the audience in, instead of pushing the actor out at them with a close-up. A lot of Fireworks is the Triumph of the Impassive Reaction Shot.

What emerges from such a method is paradoxical: everything onscreen (even the quite graphic violence) is restrained and held in, and yet the finished product puts you through the emotional wringer—Fireworks is more moving than just about anything currently in front of a Canadian movie audience. Whether a North American director could get away with it is another matter. It would be nice of someone worked up the courage to try.

-Published in The Globe and Mail, 1998