Tokyo Fist
This week the From Below Microcinema presents *Tokyo Fist *(1995) on Tuesday, December 17, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
What does a city do to a soul?
Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the inimitable cult classic *Tetsuo: The Iron Man * (1989), directs and stars in this story about an alienated office worker who unravels after his fiancee, Hizuru, begins an affair with his childhood friend, a professional boxer. He begins training as a boxer himself at an annihilating pace to confront his former friend in the ring, while Hizuru begins her own journey experimenting with body modification.
Tokyo Fist pummels you, throwing punches made all of blue light and blood. Tsukamoto’s signature frenetic camera work is here, along with a punishing industrial score by Chu Isikawa, and fantastic practical gore effects surround the characters’ bulbous, putrid make-up. All of the saccharine qualities of the underdog boxing movie film are stripped away. Instead, Tsukamoto dwells on the effects on the flesh of the sadomasochistic drive to transform one’s body through training And yet, as you’ll see in the cinematography, this film might be as much about the architecture of 90s Tokyo as it is about jealousy and boxing.
It’s a happy coincidence to screen Tokyo Fist the week after our Silent Comedy Showdown because Tsukamoto’s urbanism takes the opposite approach to Charlie Chaplin’s. *Modern Times *(1936) and *City Lights *(1931) are about the changing conditions of modern life in the city, and we watch the Little Tramp playfully bend this new world, finding germs of freedom within and against the machinations of rapid development and the growing urban working class. This week, on the other hand, the massive slabs of concrete and glass of Tsukamoto’s Tokyo after 90 more years of capitalist development are unyielding, and his characters turn their transformative agency inward, transfiguring flesh, muscle, and soul into new arrangements, ecstatically, desperately.