As surreally
weird as "Eraserhead" and as intense as a Novocainless tooth extraction,
Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" is sci-fright as only the
Japanese can do it. Funny thing, though: They usually do it through
animation. "Tetsuo" is live action -- very live -- and all the more
disturbing for it.
It begins in an abandoned factory with a young metals fetishist
slashing his thigh open and inserting cable into his leg; as he leaves,
he's hit-and-brushed by a car being driven by an office worker who wakes
up the next morning to find a metal whisker growing out of his cheek.
Soon, metal scabs start appearing all over his body.
Naturally, he's disturbed, more so when a commuter turns into a bizarre
metal-tentacle-encrusted creature and starts chasing him with the passion
of a Terminator. To make things worse, our hero soon starts having sexual
fantasies even more bizarre than his reality, and they start coming true.
All this wrecks the romance with his live-in girlfriend, particularly when
his loins become home to a huge rotating drill.
Eventually the fetishist and the office worker -- by now both metal
makeovers with a telepathic bond -- engage in a surreal battle, only to
meld into one gigantic cyber-junkpile and turn their attentions to the
rest of the world. Talk about metalmorphoses!
All this gets played out in 67 of the most relentlessly intense minutes
in recent film history. There are Western references -- David Cronenberg's
early virus films, David Lynch's wayyy-off-kilter world view, Sam Raimi's
frenetic camera work and editing, the stylized framing of silent films --
as well as Japanese ones (samurai and mutant monster films, stylized
traditional theater, explicit adult comics, a melodic industrial music
score). But the stew is all Tsukamoto's: He not only wrote, directed,
filmed and edited "Tetsuo," he also designed the special effects,
including the worker-transformed-into-Tin Man. Tsukamoto also played the
metals fetishist.
Shot in startlingly clear black and white, "Tetsuo" has a nightmarish
hyper-reality about it, feeling like a cartoon, but more disturbing for
not being one. There's very little dialogue and none is really needed in a
noisy film in which you have no idea what's going on but can still follow
it, albeit by hanging on for dear life. Hardly a big-budget blowout,
"Tetsuo" was filmed in 16 millimeter and reflects the director's urgency.
It's too easy to interpret the plot as a commentary on sexual anxiety (the
one mating scene makes David Lynch look like Disney) or runaway technology
(we're all headed for the scrap heap), AIDS and nuclear Armageddon, but
it's also apparent that in Tsukamoto's world, transformation hurts like
hell. Even to watch -- check for bruises on leaving the theater.
From THE
WASHINGTON POST
<
BACK