TOKYO FIST

(A.k.a. TOKYO-KEN)

Tsuda (writer-director Shinya Tsukamoto) ambles drone-like through his job as a door-to-door salesman. He tolerates this humdrum lifestyle because he's engaged to be wed to Hizuru (Kahori Fujii) - a woman he clearly thinks is out of his league, and is paranoid that she will one day leave him for another man.

It's a heavy burden he carries with him daily. That, and the pains in his head which he fears may be due to a tumour.

When a colleague calls him and asks him to drop off a contract to a client who falls into Tsuda's catchment area, it leads him to a local boxing gym. It's here that he has a chance encounter with old school pal Kojima (Shinya's real-life brother, Koji Tsukamoto). For reasons unknown, Tsuda isn't to see Kojima.

Against Tsuda's advice, a friendship grows between Hizuru and Kojima. The latter is prone to turning up at Tsuda's apartment in the daytime for impromptu chats with the young lady, and it soon becomes transparent that he has designs on her.

Goaded by his own sexless relationship with Hizuru, Tsuda sees red when Kojima speaks to him on the telephone and falsely claims to have slept with her. He promptly makes his way round to Kojima's apartment for a showdown ... and ends up in hospital with a broken face for his troubles.

Once he's discharged from hospital, Tsuda manages to publicly humiliate his wife while trying to reconcile with her, and then goes looking for semi-professional boxer Kojima at a local match. He's alarmed to find Hizuru has also gone to see Kojima fight, but doesn't stick around long enough to discover that she's simply there to tell her suitor that she only has eyes for Tsuda.

Ignorant to this turn of events, the once mild-mannered Tsuda decides that there's only one noble course of action left to take: he must enrol at the same boxing gym that Kojima attends, and train towards ultimately challenging him in the ring...

Following hot on the heels of his gloriously manic, original and violent TETSUO films, TOKYO FIST manages to both focus a little more on conventional storytelling and maintain the insane, hyperkinetic identity of its predecessors. The result is a jarring mix of violent love triangle which throws in ample amounts of social commentary (empty streets and barren dwellings signify the loneliness of living amongst Japan's latter-day rat race), and a surreal, nightmarish dance around the frayed ends of sanity where each punch to a character's face causes explosions of exaggerated gore to fly across the screen.

Tsukamoto's metaphors are hardly subtle. The alienation of modern life; the loss of identity due to a primary focus on work rather than personal issues; the repression of emotions and subsequent relinquishing of male dominance, which is violently reborn via the liberating thirst to fight (a notion that predates FIGHT CLUB - both the film and the book).

Someone makes a film about boxing and the tendency is to compare it to Martin Scorsese's masterful RAGING BULL. Although, making the comparison in this case is especially redundant because neither that film or TOKYO FIST are particularly "about boxing". One is a character piece that shows the sport as an outlet for a thug who hit the big time as a result of his pugilistic prowess, only to lose it all due to his inability to escape his roots; the other is about envy, love, lust, suspicion, rivalry, identity, loss and pain on every level - physical, mental and emotional. Plus, you could argue that very little compares to TOKYO FIST outside of any other Tsukamoto film: the pace and editing are crazy, harking to live-action Manga at times. The gore, as alluded to above, is barmy; performances are as tense as they come.

It's all set to a mad techno score that further raises the blood pressure and gets the viewer psyched for the bloody climax long before it arrives. Married with smart, spacious cinematography and a wonderful refusal to bow down to genre specifics - TOKYO FIST is as much a horror film as it a domestic drama; as steeped in sporting action as it is in weird sci-fi surrealism - help make Tsukamoto's film a singular, exhilarating proposition.

Third Window worked with Tsukamoto on last year's remastered release of the first two TETSUO films, THE IRON MAN and BODY HAMMER. Considering their micro-budget, lo-fi origins, the results were highly satisfying in HD.

Tsukamoto was directly involved once again with their restoration of his 1995 film, TOKYO FIST. The results are similarly good (though we were only privy to the DVD version for review purposes), boasting a new transfer of the film from original 35mm materials.

As mentioned earlier in my review, TOKYO FIST is a film that's steeped heavily in colours. These colours have never looked bolder and deeper than they do here, though consequently they do lend a softness to darker scenes and marginal noise to shadowed areas. Elsewhere, there is occasional softness to images which I'd wager is authentic to how this low-budget film was shot.

Still, blacks are solid and contrast comes across well (especially during the film's very occasional monochrome segments).

I did note during playback that some exterior scenes appeared to have a more stylised, gloomier hue to them than I remembered having in my old VHS copy of the film. I suspect some colour correction has taken place during the film's restoration. But, seeing as though Tsukamoto oversaw this, it's hard to contest that isn't the way the film should look (or, at least, how its director wants it to look).

For me, it was the first time I'd seen the film presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and with 16x9 enhancement. That was an eye-opener, the results being more viscerally thrilling than ever before.

So, despite the odd qualm, the transfer overall here is most pleasing.

Japanese 2.0 audio is well-rendered throughout, with strong use of front channels and a fine balance between clean dialogue and intentionally noise sound design. Optional English subtitles are well-written and easily readable at all times.

The disc opens to an animated main menu page. From there, an animated scene-selection menu allows access to the film via 16 chapters.

Bonus features begin with an interview with Tsukamoto. Over the course of 26 minutes he discusses the film's themes, the casting choices and the similarities between this film and his BULLET BALLET (also getting released by Third Window). He also offers some insight into the new transfer towards the end of this amiable, breezily watchable offering. Presented in Japanese with English subtitles.

A 4-minute, pillar-boxed music video contains music featured on the film's score and is a typically frantic, dizzying experience.

Finally, we get Japanese (44 seconds) and British (2-and-a-half minutes) trailers for the main feature.

TOKYO FIST remains an excellent addition to Shinya Tsukamoto's formidable directorial canon, and has been served well here by the fine folk at Third Window Films.

Also available on blu-ray.

By Stuart Willis