Dir. Ishii Sogo, 2004, Japan, 59 mins
Cast:
Tadanobu Asano, Yusuke Iseya, Masatoshi Nagase
Back in the sixties, dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno created a new, radical style of performance called Ankoku Butoh, or Dance of Darkness, an unnerving combination of sound and movement designed to shock audiences and express feelings that couldn't find an outlet in 'traditional' dance. With its abstract, nearly plotless tension build-up, its oppressive mood and a relentless soundtrack that's as central to the movie as (or more than) the scant dialogue, Sogo Ishii's Dead End Run is styllistically half-way between a Butoh performance and Run Lola Run. The film consists of three chases in which the main character is invariably pushed into a corner, but from then all conventional plot logic ceases to apply and the film becomes an image-and-sound spectacle as much as anything else. Which is not to say that the twists and turns of the action on the screen don't keep up the tension. On the contrary, there's sweat-inducing fear by the buckets and the ominous, ritual-like, constantly growing threat of violence can make watching exhausting. It's impossible to talk of a single prevailing element that makes Dead End Run. Rather, it's the combination of ingredients picked and mixed to the millimetric detail what makes it so electrifying, from the amplified breathing and motion sounds to the soundtrack to the close-ups of bloodstains on the pavement to the editing itself.
There are more relaxed, lighthearted moments as well, which come as a relief after all that tension.
The editing in particular is well-placed to reinforce the sense of non-linearity and infinite possibilities of the film and there are precious few tell-me-the-story sequences, more an abundance of running feet, bouncing cameras rushing along subways and a whole assortment of close-ups that create a visual world of their own: signs, garbage piles, skips, electrified fences, gun tips that circle forever around cowering victims. The atmosphere chosen for most of the film is slightly reminiscent of Ridley Scott's 'dark' titles. There is enough mist in this movie to make Blade Runner look like a day out in the Swiss Alps and in fact one of the characters looks slightly like a replicant. Not that we so much as know for certain who or what she is.
Dead End Run is the culmination of Sogo Ishii's career as a specialist concert and music video filmmaker with solid roots in the punk movement, in the midst of which he came of age as a university student in Tokyo in the late seventies. Many of the trademark ingredients he employs in Dead End Run (the grainy close-ups, fast motion scenes and rapid cutting) appeared early in his career in such titles as Burst City (Bakuretsu Toshi, 1982), which featured contributions from top contemporary Japanese punk bands like The Stalin . Much of Sogo Ishii's later work was done in this way, taking as raw materials footage from punk concerts of the bands he worked with to make videos or films which bore his personal imprint. Paradoxically, the death of the punk movement brought in a time of scant production for the filmmaker until he finally found his feet again as a feature director, with titles like Gojoe (Gojoe Reisenki, 2000) and the again punk-inspired Electric Dragon 80,000 V (2001). Now in his forties, it's a sure bet that Sogo Ishii's creativity will continue to find new sources of inspiration.
Miguel Sopena
|
