re:mote voices

Title: Vital
Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Nami Tsukamoto, Kiki
Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

When Hiroshi Takagi (Tadanobu Asano) wakes up in hospital he has lost his memory. His parents tell him he has been in a car crash. They had already been concerned about him, having been dropping out of medical school and disappointing their expectations that he would be a doctor. However, when he comes across his text books he can recall some of his studies, and decides to go back to medical school after all. There he quickly has an unconscious rivalry with Ikumi (Kiki), who would be top of the class if it were not for him. Between the rivalry, which becomes a relationship, and the dissection class that makes him confront mortality he starts to regain his memories. Haunted by the car crash, his mind slips between Ikumi and Ryoko, a girl he had a past relationship with. For Hiroshi reality is not entirely stable, slipping about and melding so that memories and the present mix.

Vital is a film by director Shinya Tsukamoto, who is likely most well known for his Tetsuo films. Vital is showing in the Asia Extreme season, an annual event that included his film Snake Of June previously. To some degree Vital might be considered to be one of Shinya Tsukamoto’s more mainstream endeavours, but it is still cinema as art. The colour in the film is vibrant, from the dank, fetid textures of industrial surfaces to the luminescent glow of nature. There are even a couple of scenes of dance, the car crash as dance being particularly affecting. With Vital, Shinya Tsukamoto would seem to display an influence from David Cronenberg, from the undercurrents of Crash to Takagi’s experience with the lift doors that recalls the typewriter in Naked Lunch or the video in Videodrome.

Vital is a graphic film, by measures wallowing in death then celebrating life. Full of a dark eroticism, complimented by the striking appearance of the three leads. The sound is charged, the visuals are charged, the characters are charged. Vital is a beautiful film that certainly delivers the extreme for the Asia Extreme season, and does so in a challenging fashion.