TOKYO CHORUS (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

Yasujiro Ozu’s silent Tokyo no kôrasu begins hilariously. Like his classmates, student Shinji Okajima (Tokihiko Okada, endearing) seems incapable of keeping in line—literally, I mean, quasi-militarily, on the college grounds. Ozu’s film leaps forward “several years,” where rhe comedy deepens. At the insurance company for which he works, Shinji confronts his boss over the baseless termination of a fellow employee, Mr. Yamada, an older gentleman, one year shy of his pension. This confrontation includes a riotously funny exchange of pokes, jabs and fan taps. With lovely tact Shinji explains to Yamada the upshot of all this: “It turns out this is my last day of work also.”
     This is the Depression; Tokyo is the “City of the Unemployed.” Shinji and his wife, Tsuma Sugako (Emiko Yagumo, miraculously sensitive and restrained), have a baby girl and two very young children. (Hideko Takamine, age 7, plays the elder daughter.) Shinji desperately looks for work.
     Much of the film’s later part is conventional, even sentimental; Shinji ransacks drawers of Tsuma’s cherished kimonos in order to pay the hospital bill when one of their offspring falls ill. One stunning image remains: a street curb tracking shot surveying the backs of the seated jobless.
     Shinji’s former teacher, who runs a restaurant (“Our Portions Really Fill You Up”), solicits his help in advertising the place—tactfully: “If you’re out of work, how about helping me for a while?” At a dinner reuniting Shinji’s former class, the former teacher makes a toast: “May all of you continue to prosper through hard work and self-reliance.” But we’ve seen that hard work is insufficient and one must rely on others.
     Shinji’s new teaching job means that the family must move. Mrs. Okajima’s wistful remark grazes: “I’m sure we can return to Tokyo someday.”

BULLET BALLET (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Dazzling, gorgeous, pulsating, visionary, Shinya Tsukamoto’s black-and-white Bullet Ballet brilliantly fuses social criticism, ultra-violence, West Side Story’s street gangery, Tarkovskian science fiction, and film noir to wrestle a stunning life-affirmation from a compelling description of the nihilism of young Tokyoans who see violence, including murder and suicide, as the logical extension of what they perceive to be dead-ended lives. Wrongly, some commentators have said that the film itself is nihilistic. Tsukamoto, the cult favorite who directed Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989) and A Snake of June (2002), wrote, directed, cinematographed and edited this fantastic film.
     Goda, beautifully played by Tsukamoto, seems to scurry through a dark, occasionally deadly dream. The point of departure is girlfriend Kiriko’s unexpected suicide with a gun the calibre of which only the police use. How did she get this gun? Was her death really a suicide? Goda himself investigates, descending into a gang underworld not only to discover the truth, which proves elusive, but to secure his own gun of the type that killed Kiriko so he can strike out at some portion of a dizzyingly immoral world. The mystery police gun suggests that Tsukamoto had in mind Akira Kurosawa’s swooning postwar noir Stray Dog (1949), thus laying Japan’s current moral chaos at the doorstep of the U.S. occupation that stressed capitalism at the expense of Japan’s religious foundation and family orientation.
     This is a dank film (another touch of Tarkovsky), with a leaky faucet and dripping corridors, and a rush, with flights across streets and bridges in pursuit of confrontation’s clarity. Handheld camera rules. The production design, as in a dream, makes inside Goda’s never-locked apartment one step away from some bizarre, leaky subterranean world that accesses the outdoors. People run while urgently using their cell phones.
     Futuristic; contemporary.