Tokyo Tribe (18.)
Directed by Sion Sono.
Starring Ryohei Suzuki, Young Dais, Nana Seino, Riki Takeuchi. Japanese with subtitles. 116 mins. Released on Blu-ray/ DVD by Eureka! on June 15th
A film performed (almost) entirely in rhyming couplets usually means that a selection of RADA's finest have had to work in daylight for a few weeks. Tokyo Tribe, a demented battle rap musical, is quite the best film in rhyming couplets since Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet; a piece of concentrated visual overload that even Luhrmann would struggle to match. If you were blown away by Sono's 2008 four hour epic Love Exposure and have been waiting for him to recapture that lunatic fervour than this comes close.
Sono takes the basic notion of Walter Hill's supposed Rock'n'roll fable Streets of Fire but replaces easy listening MOR with hard core rap and shoots the whole film like it is the opening tracking shot from Absolute Beginners. The camera never rests: it is constantly on the move looking for more sensations, more violence, more sexy girls, more depravity.
Does it make any sense? Not so very much, and after a while the thrill generated by this unruly vision does begin to flag, but it is constantly inventive and queasily invigorating. The film is never quite as nasty as it threatens to be, always taking a diversion into camp frivolity at the last moment. There is more violent posturing than actual violence, which is appropriate for a film about hip hop. It is still plenty unpleasant, though. For example, the film's premise – this is an alternative reality Tokyo where a different gang rules each of the five different areas of the city - is set up not in a nice little prologue but in an illustrated lecture by the chief psycho Mera (Suzuki) delivered with a knife over the naked torso of an abducted female cop, his blade moving across her chest to form a map of the city's various tribal outpost.
I can't defend the film's flippant attitude to sexual violence, but this is a film about hip hop culture, which has spent the last 30 years furiously disseminating misogyny into the culture and trying to thwart the advances of feminism. This is a film for people who use the word “mental” as praise.
Directed by Sion Sono.
Starring Ryohei Suzuki, Young Dais, Nana Seino, Riki Takeuchi. Japanese with subtitles. 116 mins. Released on Blu-ray/ DVD by Eureka! on June 15th
A film performed (almost) entirely in rhyming couplets usually means that a selection of RADA's finest have had to work in daylight for a few weeks. Tokyo Tribe, a demented battle rap musical, is quite the best film in rhyming couplets since Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet; a piece of concentrated visual overload that even Luhrmann would struggle to match. If you were blown away by Sono's 2008 four hour epic Love Exposure and have been waiting for him to recapture that lunatic fervour than this comes close.
Sono takes the basic notion of Walter Hill's supposed Rock'n'roll fable Streets of Fire but replaces easy listening MOR with hard core rap and shoots the whole film like it is the opening tracking shot from Absolute Beginners. The camera never rests: it is constantly on the move looking for more sensations, more violence, more sexy girls, more depravity.
Does it make any sense? Not so very much, and after a while the thrill generated by this unruly vision does begin to flag, but it is constantly inventive and queasily invigorating. The film is never quite as nasty as it threatens to be, always taking a diversion into camp frivolity at the last moment. There is more violent posturing than actual violence, which is appropriate for a film about hip hop. It is still plenty unpleasant, though. For example, the film's premise – this is an alternative reality Tokyo where a different gang rules each of the five different areas of the city - is set up not in a nice little prologue but in an illustrated lecture by the chief psycho Mera (Suzuki) delivered with a knife over the naked torso of an abducted female cop, his blade moving across her chest to form a map of the city's various tribal outpost.
I can't defend the film's flippant attitude to sexual violence, but this is a film about hip hop culture, which has spent the last 30 years furiously disseminating misogyny into the culture and trying to thwart the advances of feminism. This is a film for people who use the word “mental” as praise.
