Vital

The first time I saw Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital (2004) it was in one of the smallest screens in the Cineworld in the now defunct Trocadero when it was first released (the Picture House that replaced it has many of the same fittings behind the surface, but it’s just not the down-at-heels same). It’s easy to forget how, at that time, so many releases from Japan, Korea and Hong Kong were commonplace in cinemas, whereas now if we’re lucky we get them on a blu-ray release. Not always halcyon days because of course over-saturation was an issue, with lots of pretty average films appearing too (but then that never stopped Hollywood dropping dross on us) but there would be cinematic releases for Tsukamoto and his peers. I have the old Tartan DVD but somehow I never rewatched it and so the review disc was my first time viewing it in nearly 20-years.

So this is now my second viewing of Vital.

Takagi (Tadanobu Asano) wakes up with amnesia in hospital after a car accident. Despite his poor memory he is compelled to return to his medical studies, at which point the students start their four-month dissection course. Another student, Ikumi (Kiki) starts to become interested in him, though Takagi’s obsession is with the cadaver, which is that of his former girlfriend, Ryoko (Nami Tsukamoto) who died in the car crash that caused Takagi to lose his memory.

For those who only know Tsukamoto’s earlier, more overtly kinetic work, Vital may be difficult to get a handle on. Though it has its striking moments – the framing images of the industrial chimneys and especially the stylized black and white flashback to the accident – yet the more sedate aspects of Vital had always been there in his work. Those moments of disturbed serenity have pervaded his films, often suffused with humour – I mean the car crash in Tetsuo with the lounge jazz; could that be any more filled with ironic laughter? More than anything I was feeling that Vital was somehow a stepping stone between A Snake of June and his later Kotoko. I should admit I need to rewatch Kotoko and so feeding off images fed into the brain, whereas my feelings for A Snake of June I tried to make plain in my 20-year retrospective (and probably failed as it’s still his best film and if Tsukamoto can better it, well I’d be happy because that would be a worthy high).  

It’s a film that takes a little bit of getting into, in part because the film’s structure has a certain fluidity to it, as Takagi begins to feel his memories returning, we often move into flashbacks that may even be inventions of his mind in many instances. These juxtapose with the dissection, his meticulous, artistic drawing of the corpse of his girlfriend, Takagi’s visits to Ryoko’s family whose father at first is resentful, then open and welcoming, and his relationship with Ikumi who can become aggressively jealous of the dead girlfriend.

Much of the opening of the film has a chilliness to it, scenes suffused with a blue light (not to be confused with the blue tint used in A Snake of June) and the locations are often cold or austere buildings, or rundown, or tile-clad, and there was something of early David Cronenberg about some of the urban feel. It is an urban that is somehow other, separated from the normal. Even those scenes in his family home, in his old room that Takagi soon vacates for a dismal apartment, is oddly disturbing, the low ceiling likely an eaves but slanted so subtly as to be almost disorientating.

Tsukamoto balances this though with warmer images using orange-hued scenes. Memories of Ryoko move into dance (Nami Tsukamoto is a ballet dancer) and she has at times a playfulness but also suggestions that she is looking for death. How much is real or not is almost impossible to tell and you suspect it’s unnecessary to even try and work it out as really we are peering into Takagi’s mind, understanding the shape of his grief, and perhaps too there is a meditation on the nature of memory itself. How much that we remember is ever truly real and does it matter? If the here and now is grey and blue, whereas our past can be warm glowing orange and happy, what would we prefer?

Grief and guilt also play into Ikumi’s character, who herself feels responsible for the death of her jilted lover, and so maybe why she is in part attracted to Takagi. She might not at first know his past or his connection to the cadaver, but perhaps she intuits it, seeing in him aspects of herself.  Kiki as Ikumi I remember vividly from the superb Starfish Hotel (snag a DVD if you can still find one, the scenes with her in the hotel are hypnotic). It’s no surprise that Kiki is both an actor and a model, as there is always something very careful and delicate to her movements, as well as her way of speaking. Tadanobu Asano as Takagi is often silent, Tsukamoto using the camera, framing and editing to often do the work. Takagi’s obsessive chronicling of the cadaver, now alone with Ikumi at the dissection, we are shown this through a staccato repetition of sudden sound and image that is all editing. Tsukamoto is also capable of narrative subtlety, the story of Ryoko’s mother presented to us in passing, almost so that we could blink and miss it, but these moments have power, even if the emotional impact varies.  

The thing about Vital ultimately is that it is that like so many of Tsukamoto’s films, it insinuates and beguiles without you ever quite knowing what or why or how. It just does. With some films it's easy not to care about the ending, but with Vital you are sucked in right to the end even when you are not always sure what is taking place on screen and there is no great narrative conclusion. Much of how you are sucked in is through the quiet power of the images, which can be subtly unusual, sometimes almost unnerving without you being able to say why, such as one of the earliest images of Takagi’s parents. The what and the why again are impossible to pin down but the image nevertheless remains, as do some of the more elegant playful moments of dance, these I could recall even after a near 20-year hiatus from the film, just as I could recall Asano’s often almost impassive face hued in blue.  

For those with a mind open to something different, even when nothing obvious is transpiring there is much in Vital to sear into the mind. It’s not conventional but then again, when is Shinya Tsukamoto ever conventional? Sometimes here though he is downright elegant: at the end of the four-month dissection the students have to repair their work, dress the cadavers, prepare them again as human being and this is shown with delicate reverence and an extended scene and these few minutes arguably says more about aspects of Japanese culture than if you made a 90-minute documentary on it. I was quietly moved.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the ever important presence of Chu Ishikawa’s soundtrack that as always blends with Tsukamoto’s images. Moving from ambient to violently serrated static, Ishikawa's sounds are as important as any performance in the film yet without ever intruding too far; you are aware of them and their removal would be disturbing. It’s one of the great collaborations.  

Vital is never going to be a film for everyone but there’s more to its enigmatic exploration of grief, death and memory than meets the eye; likely people will come away feeling that the film is about different things, have themes I’ve not mentioned and that’s good, because it’s a hard film to pin down, to really say this is what it is about. This is no bad thing, after all, everyone always says, if we understood what is going on in Hamlet’s mind, would it be considered such a great play?