Pickled Punk

With his breakthrough film Pickled Punk, Hideo Yamaoka finds himself in the same distinguished company of contemporary filmmakers as Shinja Tsukamoto (Tetsuo) and Kenchi Iwamoto (Monkeys in Paradise). These angry young men are as far away from the cinematic salons as you can get. It seems as if they - and in particular Yamaoka - have made the eccentric and macabre their guiding-stars out of pure self-preservation. The Japanese society on the brink of disaster is dissected and scrutinized in a merciless way.

The cold and anonymous parts of the city flash by in a familiar way. People are everywhere and at the center of all this are the anxiety-ridden and confused characters of the film. The bureaucrat who is hooked on junk-food, even though it contains razor-blades and fragments of glass. The epileptic camera-fanatic who documents everything, even the unusual eating habits of the bureaucrat. The serial killer who aimlessly drifts around with a female fan in tow. They are young, restless and maladjusted in the extreme. They belong to the lost generation of Japan and they have repressed the knowledge of how to deal with reality, for the simple reason that it is too sick to handle.

The same as in last year's original, but oh so Japanese festival film, Monkeys in Paradise, these characters are inexorably locked in their relationships to everything and everybody. However if Iwamoto moves with tranquil minimalist movements, Yamaoka and his characters kick, pull and fight their way through a frustrating flow of images and sounds. A flow that immediately brings to mind punk, avant-garde and the experimental movement. Entirely without dialogue and without the ability to communicate, other than on the phone, they use their bodies as if they were disposables. In contrast to this Japanese punk music and excited radio voices throb on the overcrowded soundtrack. In the meantime we as onlookers are desperately trying to find something to hold on to in this hectic and feverish stream of images. Disconnected and bizarre images keep coming at us. As soon as we get a grip of what is going on up on the screen, Yamaoka takes a whole different route, and we are once again hopelessly lost in the constant flow. The experience may be described as a visual counterpart to the writer William Burrough's revolutionary ''cut-up'' technique, where phrases and words are mixed in a seemingly random way.

Whatever you think of Pickled Punk and its punkish mentality, it leaves nobody cold. The following quote from the film is revealing: ''People stopped calling. The corroded line smelled like blood. Nobody calls. I pretended to talk on the phone. When I got tired of it, I took out my skull, and connected the phone to it. Ten months later the bell began to ring in me and I gave birth to a cordless phone. But I do not know how to use it, so it keeps ringing.''
THOMAS RYNELL

Medverkande
Tomoko Machida, Shinya Tanaka, Jhuken Kawashima: Producent
Tetsu Yuki Oda: Manus
Hideo Yamaoka: Foto
Takayoshi Sawai: Musik
Purin Bakuhatsu Purin: Talat språk
Japanese