Vital (2004)

Just perfect...

Fresh and Exciting

Awesome Movie

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Shinya Tsukamoto is a director best known for his violent, hard-hitting and heavily industrial-influenced art-dramas, such as the 1988 cult-classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man and it's somewhat poorly received 1991 follow up Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. These films are placed alongside his two contemporary masterpieces, Tokyo Fist and A Snake of June. Whereas those films were fast, furious and hyper-kinetic affairs, punctuated by grainy cinematography, punch-drunk editing and a soundtrack of jarring industrial noise, Vital finds the maverick filmmaker in a slightly more poetic and philosophical mood; creating a slow and lingering film that looks at the notions of love and loss through the eyes of a central character trying to both understand and come to terms with the death of his free-spirited former lover.As with much of Tsukamoto's work, the film is rich in visual symbolism and texture, with the opening scene disorientating us with a kaleidoscopic montage of four industrial chimney-stacks pumping smoke into an overcast sky. Later on, after enrolling in a medical course at his local college, our protagonist will witness four bodies being dissected, including, surprisingly enough, that of the central character's deceased love. This is the central arch of the story and the location where much of the film unfolds, with Tadanobu Asano's character Takagi piecing his life back together as he literally picks apart the body of his former lover and comes to terms with his own role in the loss of her life. As you can probably imagine from a story of this nature, the film is incredibly slow-moving and deliberately paced, with Tsukamoto juxtaposing the coldness of Takagi existence of continual study and cultural isolation with the rich, warm vibrancy found in that of his late girlfriend's wild and unfettered existence on an island paradise that may or may not exist only within the fragmented mind of Takagi himself.The scenes of Takagi and his fellow medical students dissecting the rotting flesh and hollowed bones of the four symmetrically positioned corpses is sympathetically handled, with the director creating a mood of unease through the use of a sickly yellow lighting filter, so that the film manages to create an air of queasiness and uncertain anxiety without having to show anything too explicit. There are further examples of Tsukamoto using the lighting and cinematography to underpin the emotions of the character within other areas of the film, for example, the scenes in which Takagi works on his studies or reminisces about the ghosts of his life, pre-accident, are bathed in a cool blue that recalls the cold and clinical cinematography of A Snake of June, which again, brings out the sense of cold alienation central to the character's life. These colour-coded motifs are further juxtaposed by the bright and vividly beautiful colours found on the island that Takagi dreams of, recreating or reliving a brief moment of transcendence with a lover he'll never again reclaim.Vital is quite an anomaly within Tsukamoto's career thus far; standing out a slower, more deliberate and more poetic work with the emphasis placed on human emotions as opposed clinical psychology. There are still the various recurring themes on display, for example, the obsession with the fragility and the limitations of the human body; something that has been explored and exploited throughout Tsukamoto's work from Tetsuo through to Tokyo Fist and beyond to Vital and A Snake of June. As I mentioned previously in this review, the pace of Vital is slow and deliberate throughout, whilst the overall tone of the film is dreamlike and filled with uncertain. Many will no doubt find it a little dull and perhaps even boring, but many others will perhaps appreciate the believable characterisations and the rich compassion and emotion that Tsukamoto brings to the script, especially when coupled with the captivating cinematography, evocative music and air of metaphysical mystery.

Vital contains a single scene of such true, deep, tearjerking, aching love that despite all of its sleepy subtleties, it is truly great cinema. This scene makes you cry and relate to it, and only one who's ever been in deep, heavy, painful love with someone can watch it and understand what I mean. It's such stirring drama in one shot lasting about 5 minutes between two people, and you want that scene to last forever. I haven't felt any kind of emotion like that from a movie in God knows how long.There isn't much else to say about this film. Somehow, Tsukamoto has made a film so powerful based on one scene that is more emotional and moving than any work I've seen in nearly a year from many much much less dry filmmakers.

Not being the biggest fan of Shinya Tsukamoto's acclaimed cult favorites "Tetsuo" & "Tetsuo II", I was rather careful with my anticipations towards "Vital"; of which the DVD-box announces it as the director's latest masterpiece. Well it ain't no masterpiece, but it's definitely a compelling and suspense-packed thriller that I liked a whole lot better than the boisterous Tetsuo-films. Especially the basic story ideas are very ingenious and even original! The plot centers on the young Hiroshi Takagi who slowly recovers from a dramatic car accident in which his lost his whole memory and youthful spirit. The sight of a book about surgery suddenly makes him decide to study medicines, where he becomes somewhat of a strange outcast but with a natural talent to dissect corpses. Bit by bit his memory returns and Hiroshi comes to the painful establishment that he's performing an autopsy on his former girlfriend Ryôko, who died in the same accident and put her body at the disposal of the medical faculty. My main problem with "Vital" was that it quickly got tedious once Hiroshi realizes whose corpse he hacks up and - especially near the end - Tsukamoto inserts a lot of irrelevant dream sequences and images of scenic beauty. It actually would be a lot more effective and horrific as a short movie, I think. It's a fairly short film now (86 min.) but it would have been so much better as a part of trilogy like, say, "Three…Extremes" and exclusively focusing on Hiroshi's amnesia. Tsukamoto is clearly a gifted director who also knows a thing or two about cinematography. "Vital" is often beautiful to look at and loaded with symbolism. Worth watching.

It's his least wild, though it does have a certain sense of weirdness to it. The story involves a medical student (Ichi the Killer's Tadanobu Asano) who experiences a bout of amnesia after a car accident. When he re-enrolls in school, he finds himself in a dissection class taking apart his former girlfriend, who was in the passenger seat during the accident. There's a subtext of necrophilia, which Tsukamoto explores in the film's first half. But he ends up veering away from any taboos and into more conventional drama. Actually, it's still pretty unconventional. It gets a bit too ponderous in the second half, and there are some scenes that drag. But Tsukamoto captures some brilliant images, and his infamous editing style pops up frequently, and is put to great use. There are some truly wonderful sequences. I especially loved all the sequences where the protagonist visits his dead lover in a fantasy landscape. The film ends beautifully. I really liked Asano's two female co-stars, Nami Tsukamoto (not sure if she's any relation to the director) and Kiki. Both are gorgeous, though each of them could eat the occasional burger. They're absolutely skeletal. Thank God for companies like Tartan Asian Extreme. This DVD is an especially nice edition with quite a few worthwhile extras.