Tokyo Fist: Shinya Tsukamoto

Shinya Tsukamoto's Tokyo Fist is so good that it may have made the boxing genre obsolete. I cannot for the life of me think of where the boxing genre could possibly go after sitting through this 90 minute masterpiece. Extraordinarily kinetic, breathtakingly brutal, and expertly edited, I'm not sure if there is any possible way to film a punch, a block, or a fight scene without accidentally or deliberately plagiarizing Tsukamoto's visual language. Everything after Tokyo Fist is superfluous. Envisioning a Tokyo that has been drained of energy and color (both figuratively and literally), the film begins when a tepid insurance salesman named Tsuda Yoshiharu is humiliated in front of his fiance by an old high school friend named Kojima Yakuji. After his disgusted fiance leaves him for Kojima, Tsuda throws himself into the sport of boxing as a means to reclaim his manhood and establish a sense of purpose and self in a world absent of meaning. The idea of men seeking purpose through ritualized violence would be touched on a few years later in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). But that film falters and deflates when compared to Tsukamoto's punishing manifesto: the creation of self via the destruction of self. Tokyo Fist can be compared to Tsukamoto's earlier triumph Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), a film wherein a Japanese businessman is transformed into a metal monstrosity. In both films the protagonists evolve into monsters by the end, thereby providing them with a means of escape from the 9-to-5 hell of modern Japan. But if the transformation in Tetsuo: The Iron Man was involuntary, Tsuda's transformation was his own decision. Here is a film just as dangerous as its main character. It desires nothing more than revolution and destruction by way of a man's fists.

10/10