Bullet Ballet

Early in the film, Goto goes to visit a boxer, Shigeo, before his match, and walks in on the boxer with his father, a retired gangster, in a cramped locker room. The boxer scolds him for the bruise on his face, telling him to make sure the people he's robbing are really weak. The match ends in a knockout win for Shigeo, but when we see the crowd Goto's expression is intense, focused, unwavering. Later on, we find that the two have become more acquainted, since after failing three times to pull the trigger, Goto has landed in the gym where Shigeo works out. As he watches Shigeo's frenetic work on the heavy bag, something comes over Goto and he pulls the trigger on the boxer. This film never explains motivations. People are clearly motivated, but there's often something a little mysterious about their decision-making. Goda becomes obsessed with finding a Chief Special, the gun his long-time partner used to kill herself. He doesn't understand why his girlfriend, Kiriko, killed herself. He doesn't understand how she got the gun, what she was involved with to get her hands on it. This mystery becomes more bewildering as we see his attempts to get his hands on a pistol grow more and more desperate, until a strange foreign woman arrives willing to trade him a Chief Special if he'll put a signature on her marriage certificate. What he'll do with it is a little mysterious, as well. Does he intend to kill himself? Somebody else? He's become obsessed with footage of violence, editing together an absurd loop of wartime recordings intermixed with the firing of a Chief Special. The character who best inhabits the death spiral of this film has to be Chisato, who wants to die and repeatedly tries to orchestrate her own death. The first we hear is that Goda saved her from the train in a bizarre, suicidal scam put on by Chisato and Goto's gang. When Goda arrives with his homemade pistol, she tries to get him to blow her head off (little does she know the gun doesn't work). When the gang gets into a fight, she runs off after the leader, and tries to goad him into braining her with his steel pipe. There's a lot to say about the other characters, too. Idei is a drug dealer, club owner, and the leader of Goto and Chisato's gang. He thinks the gang is moving up in the world, but when Goto picks Shigeo for his target, he seems to know they're all fucked. The retired gangster is a real killer who's going to dismantle all of them. And he does, in a fantastically violent and horrifying exchange. There's also Goda's junior at the advertisement agency, who spectates Goda's downward spiral from outside. It's Tsukamoto, so obviously the entire thing is about industrial decay, economic depression, alienation. But there's also something kind of weird that happens at the end, after the boxer's father catches up with the gang. While Goto sobs over the bodies of his friends and the boss of his gang, Chisato turns to Goda and says they ought to get out of there. We watch the two of them separate, going in opposite directions. They begin picking up speed, running and then sprinting joyfully. There's something weirdly positive about it, which transcends the horror of seeing so many people gunned down in cold blood. It felt good to see two people seemingly discover reasons to live. I don't know, this movie's fucking incredible. I just busted the USB cord for my microphone like a dumbass, and in the process pulled my entire computer onto its side, so it was a good pick-me-up. (I think the computer is alright, but I'm going to need a new cord and maybe a new microphone.) "I can't carry on like this. I'll go to college to do science and engineering."