Bullet Ballet

by Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University. He is a founding member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

Shinya Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet seems to have gotten lost in the mix of the Asian cinema craze of the past decade or so. Tsukamoto's Tetsuo established the inventive auteur as a unique voice in the techno-Tokyo approach to analyzing man and machine. Tetsuo, for all of its technical bravado and confounding surrealist imagery, spoke volumes about Tsukamoto's singular worldview. More accessible than some of his other films, Bullet Ballet finds Tsukamoto exploring some decidedly more intimate and complicated human issues.

At the film's beginning, Goda, quite abruptly, finds that his girlfriend has committed suicide, shooting herself to death. After an abrupt and confounding police questioning (filmed in a series of electric jumpcuts), Goda descends almost instantly into an obsession with the how and why of his girlfriend's demise. He becomes obsessed with finding a gun to take revenge on whomever was responsible for driving her to take her own life.

His ceaseless efforts to have these questions answered leads him into a seedy underworld of young thugs, whom Goda later finds his girlfriend was involved with. He becomes consumed with rage and the desire to seek revenge.

Bullet Ballet is wrought with frenetic, chaotic energy. As Goda's journey is becoming more dangerous, so, too, is the gang's, as they come across rival gangs and, later, the Yakuza. Goda's increasingly violent interactions with the young thugs suggest something larger, an imminent catastrophe.

Indeed, Tsukamoto is concerned with more than just the Japanese youths' attraction to thuggery. Between the young gang members, the middle-aged Goda and the sterling, ferocious Yakuza (who make their presence deafeningly known at the film's climax), Tsukamoto uses Bullet Ballet's sophisticated gunplay and physically perspicuous body geography to illustrate the well-documented generational divide in contemporary Japan. The simplistic naiveté of the gang members' ultra-bombastic, West Side Story-like gang fight interludes is overshadowed by the overpowering muscle of the aged Yakuza. Caught in the middle of all of this is the wayward Goda, whose grief is all-encompassing, clouding his vision, leading him into an ill-conceived alliance with the young thugs late in the film. Divided by age, but united by violence, all three generations are affected in much the same way: eternal loss.

Tsukamoto is at the top of his cinematic game with Bullet Ballet, a masterful film. Lensed in stark black and white, the film plays like a staccato deconstruction of the French New Wave, employing many of the same formal elements of mise en scene, rich handheld photography, and the like, but employing a much more gritty, stylized aesthetic that grounds the film in an urban reality. Unlike much of the New Wave, Tsukamoto's characters are not marginalized and his philosophy is less existential and more literal: continued violence will destroy everything these people are looking for in their lives.

Bullet Ballet stands out as one of the most sophisticated and ideologically ambitious Japanese films of the past decade. Stylish, witty and always bursting with visual energy, Bullet Ballet is a breath of fresh air.