The Times bfi
London Film Festival 2004

Vital
Shinya Tsukamoto

Graham Barnfield

How do we know Shinya Tsukamoto? Why from Tetsuo: The Iron Man of course, the late night 16mm favourite which – like its penile hydraulics waving sequel – was clearly not for the squeamish. Not one for a gentle personal cameo or catchphrase, Tsukamoto’s signature shot was a close-up of a maggot-infested human wound. Where the auteur meets the autopsy, Tsukamoto could be found. Despite occasional collaborator Takashi Miike stealing much of his thunder of late, here is a director to unsettle and unnerve. Try to classify last year’s A Snake of June without exhausting your own list of film genres.

Autopsies play a big role in this latest outing. Tadanobu Asano plays Hiroshi, an amnesiac whose on-off girlfriend Ryoko perished in the road accident that robbed him of his memory. Joining medical school helps him to regain his humanity, redrawing detail onto the empty slate he has become. In particular, digging out old anatomy textbooks provides a link with the past, while getting to perform surgery on cadavers plugs him back into the present.

So far, so Cronenberg. Yet the film also finds itself at a crossroads in attitudes to the human body. Sure enough there’s enough flensing and scratching away with scalpels to satisfy the morbid and have others feeling queasy. Yet we also see a Japan where relatives understand the need to use dead bodies in medical training. No Alder Hey organs scandal here: just a dignified simple cremation of the reassembled parts and the awarding of some medical degrees. Our protagonist starts off in a fix because he has damaged his memory, and gets into deeper turmoil when he discovers he is working on Ryoko’s body – a big coincidence that is never satisfactorily accounted for in the narrative.

Hiroshi’s recognition of this body, sparked by its tattoo, allows him to enter a dream world where his relationship with the deceased becomes more real than much of what occurs in the classroom. Tsukamoto has stated in interviews and in the press pack accompanying the film that what really interests him is the human body as a starting point for all our aspirations and interactions. Alongside this shift it appears that he has dumped many of his earlier technological preoccupations. Cybernetic body horror is out, body theory is in.

For me this sets off alarm bells, not least by contrasting the rational and sane approach to medical research typified by the supporting characters with the growing Western preoccupation with the body as the site of all that’s important. If Tsukamoto wants to play to the gallery of his expanding US and European fanbase, that's fine, but it would be a shame if one of cinema’s independent spirits caved in to the navel-gazing preoccupation with the human body.