Movies: Bullet Ballet

Why? He has no answer, and finds himself growing obsessed with the event despite himself. In a recurring image in the film, he fixates on the bullet hole she left in the window in his apartment. Somehow, even if it means dispensing with everything else in his life, he must get a gun. And not just any gun, but the same kind of gun she used to kill herself with. The movie never comes out and says exactly what's in Goda's head. Like in one of Werner Herzog's movies, this is about someone with a need that is bigger than direct comprehension.

Somehow, Goda supposes, getting a gun will make him complete, where before (even with his girlfriend, with whom he'd while away endless off-peak cellphone hours with) he was not. That said, Goda is no criminal, and certainly no gun connoisseur. What little he knows about guns comes from what he glimpsed in the gun guide carried by the police to identify the suicide weapon, and from what he's been able to scrounge off the Internet. He's so inept at this whole business that he gets ripped off to the tune of 2.5 million yen by a gangster who sells him a fake (with a great deal of fanfare and secrecy) — a water pistol, loaded with iron filings to make it feel heavier in the box.

A second plot development also begins brewing around this time, one involving a gang of drug-crazed punks who beat and rob Goda. One of their gang members, the androgynous and mousy Chisato (Kirina Mano), has a tenuous connection with Goda: apparently once he saved her from being shoved in front of a train, and she bit his hand hard enough to leave scars. She hardly seems to be grateful; in fact, it's hard to tell if she seems to feel much of anything. But they share a common need of sorts, the need to experience something deep and irrevocable. There's an electrifying scene where she stands, arms outstretched, mere inches from a passing subway train — so close, in fact, that the heels of her boots are torn off. (At one point she even bites her own hand to give herself a set of scars like his.) Evidently he had not "saved" her from anything she hadn't already opted for.

Goda's pathology is explored in more detail than Chisato's, but is no less baffling. Does he want to get revenge on the gang, or (as it may seem later on) impress them and try to curry favor with them? Is he trying to close over the hole in his head by becoming one of them? The movie doesn't say, but it offers a great many bits of behavior as perspective. In one of the movie's best scenes, Goda manages to jury-rig a gun from various pieces (it looks like something that was carved off of Tetsuo himself), only to have it misfire at a critical moment. Later, he witnesses the same gangster that ripped him off get comeuppance at the hands of some Chinese gangsters. One of the dead man's streetwalkers offers him the man's gun in exchange for a marriage license (and therefore residency), but it's a sham in more ways than one — she's not a foreigner, and once he has the gun, he seems at a loss to do anything with it that he hasn't tried and failed at already.

I have seen the movie twice now and am still not completely certain of Tsukamoto's aims with this movie, but my guess is that it is ultimately about how the chase is more interesting than the catch, and how it is easy to confuse the two. Once Goda has the gun, things don't improve: in fact, they get markedly worse, with him at first attempting suicide and then desperately offering to protect the other gang members (in a bid for solidarity?) when another, even more dangerous gunman comes after them. The same goes for his relationship with Chisato; there's a moment where she's in his apartment, casually trashing everything, as if looking for what makes him tick and leaving in disappointment when she doesn't find it. Is Goda, under it all, just a thrill-seeker like her? Or is there something deeper and sicker at work?

Tsukamoto's movies always look good, no matter what the budget, and Bullet Ballet is among the best-looking of his movies. He shoots in grainy, hand-held black and white with very tight focus and many experimental light tricks, and finds the simplest and yet most eye-catching things to point the camera at. I especially loved a moment where an insect crawls out of a dead man's eye, and there's a spectacularly-filmed gang war in the middle of the film that comes close to upstaging the events it's surrounded by. (I also had to smile when one of the would-be punks frantically makes a phone call just before he's killed, so that he can tell his mother he won't be home for dinner.)

Many people hated Bullet Ballet, especially when they assumed the first half of the movie was going to lead into more of the same sort of antics (the sequence with him building his own gun, for instance — maybe people expected he would eventually wind up building his own atomic bomb or something, a la The Man Who Stole the Sun). But Tsukamoto isn't doing that with this movie: he's aiming for something smarter and more ambitious, even if that means going against an audience's expectations. It's not just about a man who gets a gun, but a man (and a woman) who have no idea what they really want, and how much trouble they get into when they mistake what they want for what they really need.