While the camera operator Kazunori Hirasawa makes dizzying passes, rapid kulbits and full rotations around its axis, as if dancing macabre dance on the first floor of the human subconscious, in a nervously fractured and hallucinatory-pattern shot of one of the leading creations of Japanese futurism and cyberpunk, the film Pinocchio 964 by Japanese underground director Shozin Fukui, wriggling with a rocky and a sexy toy, now appears in an ugly, but unspoilty, as a sexually discarded toy toy toy toy toy toy. It is noteworthy that inscribing the fairy-tale character Carlo Collodi, cleaned of the husks of the classical reading, into the metatextual microcosm of anemic Japan of the uncertain future, surrounding it with urban chaos, Shodzin Fukui made a paramount emphasis on Freudianism, and deliberately emphasizing that the central protagonist of the film is still a man - his sexual dysfunction is equally synonymous with the social isolation of already real Japanese of the twentieth century, in the vile features of the liberated sex slaves mirrored, twisting and decaying real pleasures, reflected by real work.
His background is drawn quite lapidary, but at the same time extremely clear directorial strokes, although it is obvious that Fukui is still much more interested not in the content, but in the form that intersects in the first. A form of cast stylistic eclecticism, which is characterized by monochrome necrorealistic inserts, and hot acid delusions, and existential statics, ringing the silence of the future eschatology. Sometimes the film looks like a poststructuralist set of simple motifs of Goethe and Kafka, but this line between philosophy and extreme reflection is very thin, the film language of which is multilevel and multilayered with seemingly minimal verbalization. Actio is more important than logos. Skin, latex, sperm on the face, blood in the mouth, the taste of hot iron, leashes and darkness, darkness, darkness, only darkness, calling and sucking, screaming and itching. The tape's methamphetamine narrative, contrasted by the secretion of static electricity and mutiny of the flesh with blood and guts, vomiting and hysteria, increasingly seems illogical to the finale. Chaos takes possession of everything, the cadres fall into obscurantist visions, and the hymn of freedom from the fetters of libertarianism becomes a requiem for technologized sectarianism, which pushes both the slave and his owner into the abyss of dehumanization and loss of his I. Fukui focuses not on history, but on what lies beyond it, hidden in the flesh of that inevitable intertextuality spawned by an industrial monster giving birth to even creepier monsters.
The passionate storyteller Collodi meets the passive perversion of Ryu Murakami, densely implicated in industrial angsta. The formula for the existence of such heroes in a different, more spatially wide, reality turns out to be thoroughly unsolved, despite certain cathartic convulsions of the finale, when the new Frankenstein created in the name of carnal service, paired with the entire memorylessly dissolute bride, meets again with his creator, although this meeting will be thrashed by the haze of syllogic surrealism - not the fact that everything will actually be so, because reality as such seems insignificant and completely unfulfilled. Having become a metaphor for total sexual weakness, the nightmarish Pinocchio 964 is almost completely devoid of its own identity among the same marginalized and crazy. To become him and the occasional companion Himiko – psychopathic amnesiatic, not remembering anything about himself. Through the prism of this strange heroine, the director looks at women, and in the end he sees only inexplicable suffering, madness, pain, multiplied by ugly physicality. In Fukui’s cyberpunk universe, men are weak and women are sick. At the same time, Himiko and Pinocchio harmoniously complement and save each other, although their pathological relationship cannot be called love - although what is love in this dystopian industrial dump?!
The theme of this picture is the painful existential search for the main character Pinocchio. Pinocchio is thrown out of the usual reality and in confusion seeks himself. Lounging around the city in oblivion and devastation, he is picked up by the girl Himiko, who symbolizes the feminine in the film. In contact with her, Pinocchio realizes that he all this time lacked the existential fullness of his essence and in the future the hero tries to achieve it with all his might.
There are also a number of interesting scenes in the film. For example, running around the city symbolizes the desire of the protagonist to escape from the world, the hero’s quarrel with Himiko is a symbol of the struggle of the incomplete male and incomplete female principle in order to absorb one another. The clerical pursuit of Pinocchio is a kind of response to brute reality to Pinocchio’s attempts to escape beyond the world to the universal consciousness, the atman.
Well, the main climax scene. This is not just some kind of incomprehensible action. It's the quintessence. This is the moment of universal unification and Pinocchio’s enlightenment. It's the highest. Ecstasy. Complete. Reality achieved.
So, on one unremarkable day, your humble servant Alex his mother Taruta, sipping apple cider and cracking walnuts, simultaneously included the Japanese creation of Shojin Fukui Pinocchio 964. Considering myself a hardened viewer, having previously read the reviews for this movie, I pressed the Play button with full confidence.
Urban Japanese techno-art house at its best. For an hour and a half, the picture of this action was replete with scenes of endless screams of the main characters, apparently in complete schizophrenic delirium, seasoned with tolerable keyboard music. In fact, we are witnessing a theater of the absurd, whose heroes are hopelessly ill. If in the first half of the hour it seemed that this is the author's version of "Beauty and the Beast" (although the beauty is still a monster), then the subsequent shots will make even the most prepared viewer twist, forcing him to doubt the original idea. To look for the highest meaning under this pile of blacks and fetish is a matter initially doomed to failure.
But what director Fukui cannot take away is his own style. Even if I consider fans of this creation to be mentally unhealthy people, but virtuoso camera work + decent musical design + a very absurd, but not devoid of space to be an idea - together gives not the worst result.
During viewing, your head may burst
The picture of Shodzin Fukui is able to be known as a juicy blow right between the legs and below the belt for a categorical radical with his invincible opinion about the depressing futility of such a movie.
This set of words is not a mysterious code or a secret password, after which you can adjust to the right way of some Winter soldier. This set of words is the simplest personification of the events occurring in Pinocchio 964. Of course, the nobility of the playwright intends to follow a certain plot, its twists, motivations and conflicts, but after a certain time he will either turn off the film and break the screen of the monitor, or get lost even deeper in the wilds of the Japanese concrete jungle. Seeming more worthy of attention experiment, the picture Shodzin Fukui is able to be known as a juicy blow right between the legs and below the belt for a categorical radical with his invincible opinion about the depressing futility of such a movie. Although in the film, the noble explosion touches the head, which is a bottomless well for memory, consciousness and subconsciousness. And the “well” has every chance to swollen so much that the expression “from a sick head to a healthy one” will appear on the screen in all its glory and in the most literal sense. And that will only be better.
Not to mention the duration of almost every scene. It seems endless. When you understand what’s going on in a certain episode, Shojin Fukui still experiences the attention of his viewer with manic patience. The director manages to connect two planes in one timeline - a pronounced futurism and the realities of Japan in 1990. Such a mixed mix brings a timeless character to the film. And when individual shots for a long time do not close the next scene, the viewer just has the opportunity to feel the created world. With all the madness going on, it doesn’t matter if it’s the past or the future. Pinocchio 964 begins and ends as an urban fairy tale. So the characters themselves are fabulous. The predicted story of friendship and love (as these words sound vile in this situation!) simply jumps to the supposed chronicle of insidious retribution. The human “flood”, despite serious obstacles, will find the strength to meet the bald Gepetto and show where the crabs sleep. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, The Architect and Neo, Han Solo and Kylo Ren. Everyone will see what they can see in their brains.
In some places, memory can be projected before the eyes of the familiar paranoid "Pi" Darren Aronofsky or non-stop drive clip "Smack my Bitch up". And that's angelically good! After all, one of the undoubted advantages of the creation of Shodzin Fukui is a stunning video sequence. For all the absurdity of the viewed visual solutions make it clear that everything shown does not belong to bad taste. The magnificent scene with a vomiting moment reminded a similar one from the already legendary "America Squad: World Police". The appearance of a huge head in the style of Lovecraft’s imagination offers a completely unexpected surprise after so many “gifts” throughout the film. And in general, everyone will immediately understand where the wonderful image in the profile of the respected NCi17aaMan is taken from. A truly insane and unrestrainedly funny film experiment "Pinocchio 946" will be the perfect viewing when you stop building any guesses and expectations about it.
While the camera operator Kazunori Hirasawa makes dizzying spans, rapid kulbits and full rotations around its axis, as if dancing a dance macabre on the first floor of the human subconscious, in a nervously broken and hallucinatory-mixed frame of one of the leading creations of Japanese futurism and cyberpunk, the film Pinocchio 964 (1991) by Japanese underground director Shozin Fukui, wriggling with an ugly rock-colored character, now appears in an ugly, but not a sexually discarded toy. It is noteworthy that inscribing the fairy-tale character Carlo Collodi, cleaned of the husks of the classical reading, into the metatextual microcosm of anemic Japan of the uncertain future, surrounding it with urban chaos, Shodzin Fukui made a paramount emphasis on Freudianism, and deliberately emphasizing that the central protagonist of the film is still a man - his sexual dysfunction equally synonymous with the social isolation of already real Japanese of the twentieth century, in the vile features of the liberated sex slave, distorting and disintegrating real pleasures, reflected by real work.
His background is drawn quite lapidary, but at the same time extremely clear directorial strokes, although it is obvious that Fukui is still much more interested not in the content, but in the form that intersects in the first. A form of cast stylistic eclecticism, which is characterized by monochrome necrorealistic inserts, and hot acid delusions, and existential statics, ringing the silence of the future eschatology. Sometimes the film looks like a poststructuralist set of simple motifs of Goethe and Kafka, but this line between philosophy and extreme reflection is very thin, the film language of which is multilevel and multilayered with seemingly minimal verbalization. Actio is more important than logos. Skin, latex, sperm on the face, blood in the mouth, the taste of hot iron, leashes and darkness, darkness, darkness, only darkness, calling and sucking, screaming and itching. The tape's methamphetamine narrative, contrasted by the secretion of static electricity and mutiny of the flesh with blood and guts, vomiting and hysteria, increasingly seems illogical to the finale. Chaos takes possession of everything, the cadres fall into obscurantist visions, and the hymn of freedom from the fetters of libertarianism becomes a requiem for technologized sectarianism, which pushes both the slave and his owner into the abyss of dehumanization and loss of his I. Fukui focuses not on history, but on what lies beyond it, hidden in the flesh of that inevitable intertextuality spawned by an industrial monster giving birth to even creepier monsters.
The passionate storyteller Collodi meets the passive perversion of Ryu Murakami, densely implicated in industrial angsta. The formula for the existence of such heroes in a different, more spatially wide, reality turns out to be thoroughly unsolved, despite certain cathartic convulsions of the finale, when the new Frankenstein created in the name of carnal service, paired with all the memorylessly dissolute bride, meets again with his creator, although this meeting will be thrashed by the haze of syllogic surrealism - not the fact that everything will actually be so, because reality as such seems insignificant and completely unfulfilled. Having become a metaphor for total sexual weakness, the nightmarish Pinocchio 964 is almost completely devoid of its own identity among the same marginalized and crazy. To become him and the occasional companion Himiko - psychopathic amnesiac, not remembering anything about himself. Through the prism of this strange heroine, the director looks at women, and in the end he sees only inexplicable suffering, madness, pain, multiplied by ugly physicality. In Fukui’s cyberpunk universe, men are weak and women are sick. At the same time, Himiko and Pinocchio harmoniously complement and save each other, although their pathological relationship is impossible to call love - although what is love in this dystopian industrial dump?
The land of the rising sun is generally famous in the world for its abnormality - and this abnormality does not resemble the abnormality of a European or an American. These Japanese are going crazy in their own way.
I don’t remember why I decided to watch this movie, but I watched it all the way to the end. It is incomprehensible to the mind, as he managed to do - in this art house for a yen and a half about a dozen moments, during which any viewer, not shifted on the work of the mentally ill, would decisively leave the viewing. But I am attracted to the work of psychopaths – for example, I read Daniil Kharms with ecstasy, although he is a patented psychopath. But there was something great about him.
So this terrible creation of citizen Fukui as a whole is perceived if not as a masterpiece, then something close to that. But this feeling is a consequence of cheating. Yes, this is a fraud, because this picture is interesting solely because of its absolutely stunning abnormality. She is insane, and this madness can be seen in everything - in the surreal angles, in the violent attacks of epilepsy of every actor, in the monstrously prolonged scene of the vomit of the main character, when she throws rice porridge pouring from her mouth, half of the local subway. It is filmed so that a lump to the throat will roll even the most squeamish.
Fukui is a madman in the director's chair. But how, tell me, did he manage to convey his madness to actors? Glavheroes Pinocchio and his girlfriend Himiko do on the screen what in real life is brutally suppressed and then carefully and for a long time treated. The rest are struggling to keep up, and as a result, while watching, you seem to open the veil of natural madness, hiding the brain of the madman. So could only take a Japanese, a little man from another planet.
This is total neumenosis, which is good because it is disgustingly terrible. In that sense, he's fucking great. It’s like a work of art that looks so nasty that someone happily dumps a million dollars for it, and then puts it on display. All the way, people on the screen are being cramped, they devour some garbage from garbage cans, rattle in bad voices and run in circles and in a straight line. The logic of events is buried under a pile of psychosis so that it is barely traced, and in the end, this logic is shot with a grenade launcher. In general, there the girl Himiko's head becomes a meter in diameter, Pinocchio tears it off, and sticks his own inside this head. You think I'm kidding or crazy? No: this is the movie Pinocchio 964.
But as for the video, it's amazing. The composition of the frame is perfect, and these frames are clearly made from one take, which indicates that the operator is an unrecognized genius. However, they are all unrecognized, the authors of this thrash. And rightly – on our planet there are too few Zhanna Aguzarov, who will be imbued with the charm of this tin to the fullest. I didn't get it. I almost threw up.
For fricazoids with reference -
8 out of 10
For normal people, absolute zero in all parameters (if not minus ten)
While for Americans, the cinematic genre of cyberpunk is clearly defined by the blockbuster technogenic-computer sophistication of the “matrix” type, the East has always followed a different and, in my opinion, much more interesting path. The Japanese have their own ideas and know-how. And “Pinocchio” is just a model of such a “different” dirty art-house cyberpunk, focusing more on “punk” than an “cyber”.
I will immediately say that the iconic “Iron Man Tetsuo” tape is neither stylistically nor visually similar. Being a cyborg, Pinocchio is not actually mechanized at all, and looks like a kind of crazy freak. He is really a very bright and unusual fool – I have never seen a character more convincing in his absolute insanity, so I was really impressed by Hage Suzuki who played him. However, Himiko (Pinocchio’s mentor, who was also his kind of mother, if I correctly understood the director’s idea), finally going off the rails in the middle of the film, did not concede to his partner in the degree of abnormality, and the duo turned out to be truly brain-destroying.
Actually, the first thing you pay attention to is the excellent work of the operator. Views are something. The beauty is indescribable. Comrades working in the fashionable now "genre" shooting on a handheld video camera, should watch this film (by the way, almost twenty years ago) and bite off their elbows with envy. Each individual, even the simplest scene, whether it is static or dynamic, is shot so competently and interestingly that it turns into a real work of cinema and an illustrative textbook for any operator. No exaggeration.
Fukui offers the viewer a kind of orderly chaos. It's hard to call it anything else. Despite the fact that this is a really distinct dark futuristic drama of the “extra man”, in the events and actions of the characters of which there is consistency and logic, the surreal manner of presentation of the material (a la David Lynch of the sample of “Eraser Heads”) is still very disorienting. This is not criticism, but admiration and praise. Thinking when viewing is problematic - too catchy and does not let go of the video itself. Actually, you don’t even need to think – in the case of Pinocchio, you can just look at it and frown with pleasure. Or from disgust – there is something closer, although the film is not scary at all. The usual methods of “frightening” are absent in it, and the rigidity of some individual moments is determined by the above-mentioned surrealism of what is happening, coupled with a demonic montage.
When it comes to highlighting the film’s key moments, the most powerful scenes are a few episodes of Himiko at the train station. It is in them that the heavy drama of the so-called “loneliness in the crowd” simply goes off the scale and is remembered for a long time. And of course, the business card of Pinocchio, a kind of mad Forrest Gump in chains, rushing through the streets of the city, is chic and shine, which you can look at endlessly. By how mesmerizing this scene is, I would even compare it to the ending of Zabriski Point, although this is certainly an attractive analogy for which you have to throw rotten tomatoes.
I'm not praising you. I start to scold, although there is nothing to scold. I don’t like the scenes in the basement, when the bad guys come to eliminate the unfortunate cyborg – this episode is too dark, protracted and slurred. But I would forgive him if it weren't for the ending. Completely stupid ending beats like a butt on the head. Why was it so mocking to cheat – what, one asks, prevented Fukui from completing his story in a transparent-amorphous way as in the same Tatsuo?
But, one way or another, the work is undoubtedly worthwhile, interesting and original even for its specific cyberpunk genre. Although someone who is potentially not disposed to listen to screams and watch epileptic seizures for an hour and a half, may not get it.
8 out of 10