Yasuzo Masumura - A Lustful Man (1961)

Masumura's no holes bared-style is capable of the best and the worst. He does not shy away from anything and it is this characteristic that makes for exciting and unpredictable cinema. However, it can just as well end in muddled and uninspired moments and A Lustful Man struggles to find a balance between the two. Roughly the first and last 30 minutes are invigorating, the middle passage being unfocused and losing itself in an episodic structure that doesn't let any room for the story to breathe. While the incessant forward-motion of the narrative is characteristic to all of Masumura's films, at times, like in Irezumi, this story bulwark hinders us to absorb enough of it to fully enjoy it. Which doesn't prevent the director from giving us interesting glimpses into his gender politics and his critical view of materialism.

Yonosuke is a young man who's only reason to live is to bed women and allegedly to make them happy. He is the son of a rich business man and is disowned by his father when he fails to live the responsible life that is expected from him. Stealing money from one of his father's businesses, he buys a geisha so she can be free to live with her lover. He subsequently travels from place to place, meeting women, embarking on strange adventures with them, until he finally gets back home where his father lays dying. Dad hands him down all his fortune just before kicking the bucket and Yonosuke spends all of it on parties and women. When it is time to pay taxes on his new-found riches, Yonosuke flees because he can't pay them, having spent all the money.

Based on a novel by Saikaky Ihara, the film depicts a lot of different sexual practices, tapping into prostitution, arranged marriages and even homosexuality when Yonosuke finds himself in a bordello filled with transvestite geisha's. At the same time, Yonosuke, the carefree whippersnapper, is the only character in the film who seems entirely happy and finds a solution to every situation. Most of the women he encounters either wind up dead, broken or humiliated, Yonosuke emerging as the only insouciant character. One explanation may be that in a world, as envisioned by Masumura, where virtually every human interaction is based on an economic transaction, our protagonist is the only one who refuses to prescribe to this mode of interplay. The fact that love, sex and happiness seem to hinge on wealth and influence is everybody's downfall, but Yonosuke, by not participating in this spiel, remains unaffected by the destructive nature of money. As soon as he acquires some, he immediately finds a way to spend it all. His father is introduced as a greedy bean counter and nothing in the film suggests that this way of life provided him with happiness.

On the other hand, Yonosuke appears as possessed, crazy and irresponsible. Clearly Masumura's theme of love as a state of mental illness is made very explicit here, where Yonosuke's quest for women is nothing more than a bender of self-destruction. The question then becomes what the solution might be. Masumura depicts rich and poor individuals as equally grotesque, seems to make fun of Samurais and presents women purely as objects ready to be bought and disposed of.  Yonosuke, the character who seems to defy the rules of the game, is the only one who appreciates women for what they are: human beings who can enrich a man's life. "Treat her like a queen and she will be a queen", he says. "Treat her like a witch and she will be a witch". Might it be that Masumura argues for a better treatment of women? In any event, the individual actions of one single protagonist manage to defy the prevailing order. In that, A Lustful Man, while not one of Masumura's more successful offerings, ties neatly into his body of work.

Yasuzo Masumura - The Double Suicide of Sonesaki (1978)

The Double Suicide of Sonesaki could be described as the Japanese incarnation of Romeo and Juliet. Two lovers, outcast from society but obsessed with each other, decide to commit suicide together in order to preserve their pride and the purity of their love. As this synopsis suggests, this is also another Masumura picture in which he explores the insanity of love. Based on a popular doll play by Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1653-1725), the story was adapted to the screen before, most notably by Masahiro Shinoda in 1969 with the surreal Double Suicide. But where Shinoda's version veered frequently into the fantastic, Masumura, though working on a noticeably very slim budget, turned in a more realistic effort, concentrating on the madness of love, rather than the mechanics of the story.

Watching the movie, I kept thinking about a German gameshow that was popular during the 1990's called Geld oder Liebe (Money or Love). Singles were paired up and had to accomplish different tasks. During the course of the evening, the pairings would change so that at the end, the audience would have seen everyone interact with every other contestant. The audience could vote on their favorite couple. The winning pair then had the choice between going on a date paid for by the network, or taking money they had won by performing the tasks during the show and go home alone. In Double Suicide, there is something similar going on. The woman, Ohatsu, is a prostitute and has been sold to an old merchant who wants to take her away from Osaka. The man, Tokubei, has been raised by a merchant and has been promised to a woman, with which he could hold a new shop in Edo, also far away from Osaka. They have the choice between betraying their love and live in luxury, or stay true to their feelings and reject wealth.

Our lovers have to fight against the power structures created by the money, and their only way out, it seems, is death. The people subjecting them would have spent a lot of money in vain if Ohatsu and Tokubei were to keep up the relationship, refusing to bow to the forces of society. This ties into the larger thematic that can be found throughout Masumura's work: society's constraints and individual actions to "fight the power". The lover's relationship is illicit. They break out from the societal mold and try to live a life on their own terms. But since this is not possible in a highly regulated society like 1700's Japan, their only way out is suicide. In the afterlife, a place that is thought of as more free, where individuals can do as they please, they will reunite and finally be able to consummate their love, without the strains of their cast. Only in death can they live out their individuality.

I don't want to push it too far, but I discuss in my post about Masumura's 1971 film The Music how Reiko, the female main protagonist, could only experience sexual pleasure with impotent men or during necrophiliac acts. Could death as an agent for liberated love be seen as a common theme in Masumura's late oeuvre? Unfortunately, only few of the director's later films are available to the Anglo-Saxon audience. But taking into account the 1969 film Blind Beast, in which the sado masochistic sexual practices of a kidnapper and his captive lead them to kill each other as a substitute for the ultimate orgasm, we may be on to something here (Further considering what one can read about films like Lullaby of the Earth (1976) and Eden No Sono (1980) which I wasn't able to find but who are both described as psychological sexploitation films may reinforce this theory). In any event, The Double Suicide of Sonesaki is a wonderful offering from a director who's commanding style and meticulous camera blocking overcomes what must have been an evanescent budget (at times, the clunky lighting looks like taken straight from a halting student film). The two main performances are convinving in all their histrionics and Masumura's usual ironic detachment from the film text makes its glorious pathos all the more satisfying.

Yasuzo Masumura - The Music (1972)

 

Part of David Cairns' Late Show at Shadowplay.

The Music, a late submerged Masumura classic available only through backdoors via a VHS rip with antic image quality, is obviously the work of a mature director who has found his subject and knows where to go with it. What Jonathan Rosenbaum called "a cinema of mad people", I call the exploration of love as a state of mental illness and The Music is the culmination of this probing. More shocking than Blind Beast (which is a feat in itself), more radical than Manji, more twisted than Irezumi, Masumura, who co-wrote the script, distilled everything that made his cinema exciting and frenzied into an even stronger brew, mixing surreal imagery, a hyperventilating camera and a keenly Freudian approach to character work.

Reiko, a middle-aged woman, seeks out the help of a psychiatrist because she feels sick and can't hear music. Soon, however, doc discovers that her problems are of an entirely different nature and that her repressed sexuality is at the roots of all her psychological troubles. "Music" is a metaphor for sexual arousal and pleasure, and Reiko does not enjoy sex (does not hear the music!) unless it is with weak, emasculated men, or corpses. We get a scene with Reiko at a young age, playing rock-paper-scissors with three other boys. The looser of the game, it is established, is getting his penis cut off. Reiko loses first, and the boys hold her against a wall, pull down her pants while one of them kneels in front of her with a pair of scissors...and doesn't find anything to cut. The boys' explanation is that her penis has already been cut off and she is left humiliated, vilified, vanquished. Reiko, then, develops an obsession with scissors and imagines, in a disturbing dream sequence, her legs as a pair of scissors poised to cut off the penises of her lovers, upon which a bull appears to her with horns in the form of overdimensioned penises.

Furthermore, we learn that she had her first sexual experience with her brother, and that she was raped by her fiance which prompted her to leave her native village and flee to Tokyo. However, once she learns that said fiance is dying, she comes back to him and is turned on by the fact that he breathes his last. Once he is dead, she engages in an affair with an impotent man but leaves him once he makes sweet love to her, since his new-found sexual expertise prevents her from hearing "the music". We then get a lot of Reiko's relationship with her brother, a doomed co-dependency that is the key to her sexual repression, and if all of this doesn't seem to make any sense, Masumura and his co-writer Yukio Mishima, the world-famous novelist who played the lead role in Masumura's Afraid To Die, actually pull it off to give a somewhat sensible explanation for all of this when the psychiatrist finally "cures" Reiko.

As crazy as all of this sounds, The Music is as intricate a character study as one is likely to find. Granted, Reiko's character is almost exclusively reduced to her sexual behavior, but we explore it in all its alarming facets and Masumura makes it very explicit that his investigation into lovesick and sick-sexual behavior serves him as a way to unearth greater societal ills of rampant modernity in a confused society. Kisses and Seisaku's Wife are prime examples of this, and although The Music is less focused on issues of society, it can not simply be shrugged off as a sexploitation flick. Themes of family ties and traditional obligations are touched on, albeit obliquely, and Masumura's controversial status as a "women's director" takes on a new facet.

Highly recommended.

Yasujiro Ozu - A Mother Should Be Loved (1934)

Today is Yasujiro Ozu's birthday.

When the patriarch of the Kajiwara family dies, his young sons Sadao and Kosaku are told that they have to support their mother Chieko. Eight years later, Sadao, now a college student, learns that he is not Chieko's biological son but the offspring of his father's first wife. He scolds Chieko for treating him better than Kosaku and tries everything to alienate them both because he does not feel worthy of their care. In the end, the family pulls together and all the conflict is resolved. Ozu himself has said about A Mother Should Be Loved that "the script should've been polished more (...) the film turned out to be rather dull". I for one rather enjoyed this film as it presents an interesting variation of his favorite theme, male authority. But watching this movie, from which the first and last reels are missing, I kept thinking about something that bothered me about Donald Richie's account of how the director and his collaborators put together their scripts in his 1974 book Ozu.

Richie's description of Ozu's work method and his diary excerpts are fascinating. What troubles me is Richie's assertion that Ozu's scripts are superior to most others because of his unorthodox approach to writing. He observes about "conventional" scripts: "they are begun at some hopefully propitious juncture, and character is observed to form. The story or plot rises from this character, or the story or plot forces the character to evolve in a certain way, and when action is over and a change observed, the script is considered finished." He goes on to write: "Ozu had little use for [this model], feeling that it distorted character and destroyed verisimilitude." Ozu's stories, one can read, emanate exclusively from character, are purely anecdotal and incidental and don't follow any common (western) plot arc. Let's now, just as a mind game, consider A Mother Should Be Loved and how, if one wanted, one could divide its story into a regular Hollywood three-act structure. Usually, and speaking in very broad strokes, the first act of a Hollywood script establishes the world the movie will take place in, as well as the characters and their relations. Act two break occurs when a major incident forces the main character(s) to go on a journey of some kind in order to fulfill a need or overcome an obstacle that upset the order we have seen in Act 1. Midpoint is reached when the main protagonist realizes that his need is much deeper or his problem different from what he thought, propelling him into a new direction. Act three break occurs when the protagonist finally figured out how to overcome the obstacles and complete his journey. Act three is, to speak with Jaccob Krueger, "kicking ass or getting ass kicked".

Now consider the film we are discussing here. The first reel, as I mentioned, is missing, but from what one can read about it, it establishes the family dynamic (especially the relationship between the father and his two sons). I would consider this the first act. Act one break occurs at the father's death, creating the need for both sons to care for the mother and exposing the conflict between Chieko and Sadao. I would argue that Sadao is in this case the main character who's emotional journey is dictated by the want to belong emotionally to a family structure that he feels has been taken away from him by the news that Chieko is not his biological mother. The story's midpoint is reached when Sadao alienates Chieko so much that she cries, prompting Kosaku to confront his brother about it. It ends in a physical fight and Sadao leaves the family. Chieko then tells Kosaku the truth about Sadao's origins. Act three break occurs when Sadao is finally convinced to accept his family situation and recognizes that Chieko and Kosaku love him no matter what. The missing ninth reel, the family's reunion and their move to the suburbs, constitutes the third act, or "kicking ass".

Of course, all the above is a wholly artificial mind-game, over-simplyfied and probably inaccurate. And my point is not to argue that Ozu in fact worked with a Hollywood type blueprint (although he was a fervent admirer of Hollywood cinema which doubtlessly left many traces on his work - one example would be the americanized Dragnet Girl). Of course his stories are more deeply concerned with character than most others, and his films generally very meditative. But can't they be just that? Why must Western critics always infuse his work with some kind of Eastern mysticism that seemingly elevates his films above the rest, but doesn't make much sense once one takes a closer look? To get back to Richie's account of Ozu's writing process, he describes how the director and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda went from the original idea, to an outline and disposition of characters, to the actual script writing. Both men would write ideas for scenes on cards and arrange them in a way that seemed satisfactory. Sometimes they shuffled the cards on a table and rearranged them from there, as it was commonly done for animated cartoons. "Even then", Richie writes, "'work' had not even begun".

Firstly, the author completely misunderstands what a screenwriter actually does. What we call "breaking" a story, in Ozu's case writing down scenes on cards and shuffling them on a table, is the lion's share of what Richie calls here the actual "work", the writing. It is the creation of characters and plot, before tackling it in script form, that constitutes the real work of the screenwriter. In that, Ozu is not different from anyone else. He is just very good at it. Furthermore, doesn't the fact that Ozu and his writing partners took meticulous care that individual scenes would be placed at the exact right spot contradict Richie's prior assertion that Ozu's work consisted simply of intuitive character work? Ozu might have said once that plot "bores" him, but Noda writes in his diary: "March 15. Started, but decided some large comic incident is lacking. March 16. We've constructed something or other, but something is missing". If Ozu "decides" on plot points and "constructs" events, what, then, does Richie mean when he writes "certainly there is in his films rarely anything resembling [plot]"?

Sure, Ozu doesn't stage skating robots and broom riding contests, but what else than "story [rising] from character" (Richie about Western-style screenplays) does he give us in A Mother Should Be Loved when he invents a family situation that will lead to inevitable confrontations between the different family members, all resulting in a certain fallout that creates new conflict so as to reignite the story every 10 or so minutes? What Richie ignores is that in the absence of external conflict (skating robots) the writer turns to internal conflict (Sadao's guilt and resentment) and makes it his plot. And as he demonstrates in chapter 2 of his book, Ozu went to great length to get that plot right.

This is not to say that Ozu's work is interchangeable with the myriad other authors who simply crank out by-the-numbers scripts, and he surely developed his very own style over time. A Mother Should Be Loved simply reminds us that sweeping generalizations about Ozu ignore a lot of facets of his work. Western critics have not done right by the complexity and diversity of his oeuvre. Especially his early films would be a great starting point for a general re-evaluation of Ozu's body of work by more adept minds than myself.

Yasujiro Ozu - I Flunked, But... (1930)

"Exams are only a game of astuteness", says one of the characters in I Flunked, But... which describes exactly the attitude of most of the characters in this funny but sometimes surprisingly crude offering. Takahashi, his pals, and his roommates all take their final college exams. They cheat by writing down notes on the back of one of Takashi's pals' shirt and relaying the answers from one to the other. After Takashi prepares another shirt for the next day's test, the house lady takes it to the dry cleaners. Takahashi and all his pals flunk, while his roommates all pass. But, unable to find employment, they long for the care-free days of college, while Takahashi and his gang become cheerleaders.

I Flunked, But... is a straight forward college comedy that touches on a few themes Ozu will develop later on in his career. Male bonding is obviously of great concern here, as the film features only one single female character, but it is not really developed. The altering nature of time is another theme that is hinted at. But contrary to The Only Son, where the passing of time is something that has to be endured and has an exclusively negative outcome, I Flunked, But... exhibits a more positive approach where melancholy functions as romantic reminiscing, as the four roommates think back to their time as benchwarmers. Although they are unemployed, there is no social commentary, no despair, no lesson to be learned. Ozu also seems to introduce the idea that time passes more quickly when one is young and is having a good time. The bleak reality of life - finding a job, having to shoulder responsibilities- decelerates time considerably, making the adult life all the more dull. Ozu illustrates this by juxtaposing Takahashi and his pals having a good time as cheerleaders at their school with the four unemployed roommates staring at a clock that doesn't seem to move, wishing they were back hitting the books (which also introduces the theme of college as a reformative time that will later be featured in Tokyo Chorus).

It is important to point out this cross cutting, not only because Ozu will abandon this stylistic pirouette altogether later on, but because, in this instance, he uses it as a narrative agent. In the first half of the film, Ozu frequently uses tracking shots of lined up or sitting students that accentuate the unity of the student corps, and their shared destiny. Once the results of the exams are announced, Ozu uses cross cutting to accentuate Takahashi's and his roommates' now diverging life lines. With relatively few intertitles, Ozu shows with I Flunked, But... a commanding sense of visual narration. Another example is the film poster of Charming Sinners that hangs on the wall of Takahasi's dorm. Not only is it a humorous commentary on the mischieveous behavior of Takahashi and his friends, but it also features the two main characters of that film in an embrace. Once Takahashi's girlfriend brings him food to eat and a clean shirt, he hangs the shirt on the wall, covering most of the poster, leaving out only the two lovers - a direct comment on the lovebird's relationship. Later, after Takahashi flunked, the shirt, returned from the cleaners but still adorning some of the cheating notes, hangs there again, almost accusatory, reminding Takashi that he deceived his girlfriend.

Despite all of Ozu's narrative mastery, I Flunked, But... is startlingly clumsy at times. The most shocking example of unconfident framing is given after the first exam scene, as Takahashi and his pals all walk in unison towards the camera. Ozu tracks back but doesn't keep everyone in frame, panning shakily back and forth over the five men. Not only does he use two camera movements rarely employed later in his career, but its very use appears sloppy to me. Other instances of unfocused framing and lighting occur later in the film as well. For all their humor and funny moments, the two pivotal exam scenes that show the students' elaborate cheating methods (that also introduce the theme of defiance of authority) seem to have been used by Ozu as a kind of rehearsal and springing board for Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? which features much more intricately staged cheating scenes from the point of view of editing and story as well.

Maybe I am missing something, but with a 65-minute playing time and relatively little substance, I Flunked, But... feels like a minor effort from Ozu, who would put a lot of the elements already present here to much better use in subsequent films. It is nonetheless an enjoyable offering.

Yasujiro Ozu - Tokyo Chorus (1931)

 

Tokyo Chorus seems to be the transition film between Ozu's earlier student comedies and his examination of the plight of the worker in tuff economic times he focuses on later. He introduces here a lot of elements and themes he would expand later and employs elliptical cut-aways for the first time I am aware of. Episodic in nature, but very focused on its main theme, the script centers once more on the question of masculinity and how men negociate their status in trying times. Every episode in the story is used to investigate a different facet of our main character's fight for male status. As is often the case, I am not entirely happy about Ozu's resolution of the problem, but Tokyo Chorus has to be counted among his (many) classics for its technical amplitude alone. The film's narrative structure is extraordinariy symmetric. We open and close with the same group of people, and in between, sequences forebode and recall each other.

On the day he gets paid a bonus, Shinji loses his job because he protests against the firing of another older colleague. When his daughter gets ill and has to be hospitalized, he has no choice but to sell his wife's kimonos to pay the medical bills. Later, he encounters his old teacher Omura who hires him to promote his restaurant. It is a tedious and, in Shinji's eyes, humiliating job but in the end, Omura finds him a real job as an English teacher in the countryside.

Tokyo Chorus opens on a slapstick college scene that establishes a lot of what we are going to see later in the film in more detail. Omura is a teacher and tries to bring order to a horde of defiant students. Among them, Shinji is one of the more flamboyant and impudent ones and he gets reprimended by Omura. We get glimpses into both Shinji's and Omura's characters and a first questioning of male dominance: in this case, it is young men mocking the authority of older men. Cut to years later. Shinji now works at an insurance company and it's the day everyone gets their bonus. Here, Ozu scrutinizes two models of male authority: financial providing and age. In an elaborate and expertly shot comedy sequence, the employees all hide from another how much they got paid. No one wants to lose his face should he reveal that he received less than a colleague. Everyone wants to project the image of the reliable provider. In the same sequence, Yamada is fired, simply because he is old, which reminds the whippersnappers in the office that their status as providers will, one day, inevitably be threatened as well, simply because the corporation wants to pump new blood into the workforce. Shinji, mirroring the first scene in which he ridiculed his elders, now stands up for them and speaks up to the boss - but is fired as well.

Next, Ozu gives us three stages of Shinji as father figure. After losing his job, Shinji buys his son a scooter, although the son wanted a bike. The son calls his father a liar, questioning Shinji's authority as the man of the house. Shinji's reaction? He beats his son. Later, when the family brings the daughter back from the hospital, Shinji acts as a unifying figure. He cheers up his kids by playing clapping games with them, and after recovering from the shock that her husband had to sell her kimonos in order to pay the medical bills, Shinji's wife joins them as well. But this family bliss doesn't last long. His wife and two kids spot him from a streetcar as he drags himself through the streets handing out leaflets for Omura's grease spoon (a scene that mirrors an earlier one where Shinji happens on Yamada who must hand out leaflets to make ends meet), a task he considers beneath someone who graduated from college. Even his wife won't believe it at first. When she confronts Shinji about it, his last shred of manhood his torn away. Not only does he not fulfill his role as provider by getting fired and being unable to find a new position. But he has to demean himself by doing work that is below his social (and male) status. The end foreshadows both Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and The Only Son. In a scene where all of Shinji's old college chumps convene in Omura's restaurant, there is a very strong sense of nostalgia and a reflection on what time does to individuals that will later be developed in The Only Son. The resolution of the main crisis (Shinji's unemployment) demands relocating the family which will also be the case in Toda.

Yasujiro Ozu - Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932)

With someone like Ozu who exhibits such a thematic consistency throughout his body of work, it is interesting to jump around his filmography and see how certain subjects are molded and remolded and how he approached his theme from different angles. Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?, perhaps my favorite Ozu so far, tackles the theme of modernity again, by way of class and male relations. Watching it immediately after having seen The Only Son, it became apparent pretty quickly that under the surface of slapstick comedy that comprises much of the first half of the movie the film text offers a lot about how youths defy tradition but still operate within its boundaries. The question of "modernity" is not so much one of living conditions and societal transformation like in The Only Son, but rather one of individual behavior.

Tetsuo is a rich student, enjoying life with his college pals. He has an eye on the soda-fountain girl Oshige. When his father dies Tetsuo inherits his firm and serves as the new director. His college pals come to him to ask for work and Tetsuo helps them to cheat on the admissions test. Unaware that Saiki, one of his pals, is now engaged to Oshige, Tetsuo begins courting her. When he finds out about the engagement, he violently beats up Saiki.

A lot can be said about how Tetsuo's old friends become yes men once the class difference between them is apparent and how this can be seen as a metaphor for larger societal issues, but I was more interested, like with The Only Son, in the question of "tradition" versus "modernity". One scene in particular is interesting in that regard. Tetsuo's uncle has chosen a prospective wife for Tetsuo. But he doesn't want to meet her. With the help of his father, he feigns drunkenness and behaves in such a bad manner that it drives her away. Yamamura, the chosen wife, is called "the modern one" and she tells an older woman, "our times are different from yours!" When Tetsuo's father explains that his son is drunk, becomes violent when he drinks, and even steals, "the modern one" sees this more as qualities than anything else. She is attracted by this "bad boy" type, that stands against everything a more conventional (i.e. traditional) husband would need to be. It's a first-hand clash between old values and new ones. But Ozu, not one for easy characterizations, then takes the scene in another direction. Tetsuo finally comes to meet his prospective wife. He taps cigarette ashes into her purse, throws her lighter away and says that her bracelet is a fake. What started as slapstick turns into gratuitous cruelty. Ozu, who always made fun of the upper class, depicts them very harshly as spoiled sadists who mess with other people's lives for fun. The upper-class might be a motor for progress (whatever that means), but they are not better human beings for that.

As I see it, Ozu also makes the point that whatever this progress might be, time always catches up. What once was new becomes the norm, or even the tradition, and this cycle of breaking the mold and defying conventions begins again. When we first see Tetsuo as the new director of the company, the camera, in one of Ozu's early signature moves, tracks over a bunch of employees who all yawn (a scene foreshadowing the similar famous sequence in I Was Born, but…) and stops on Tetsuo who yawns as well. The new director, it seems, is, at this point, not too far removed from his subordinates. Subsequently, there is a lot of back and forth between him and the more conservative co-director about Tetsuo's unburdened and easy-minded management style (again a clash between old and new values). Later, Tetsuo's mother tells him, "you look more and more like the director". At work, it also seems like he is more competent and respected. It is at this point, that the divide between him and his pals becomes evident. Society, through various norms and codes of conduct, gulped Tetsuo's new dynamism and spat out an adjusted elitist. It is not that he adhered to the old ways, it is that he becomes the old way. And so, still nothing has changed.

A great film that gives us a lot to think about.