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BATTLE
ROYALE
8/10
Japan
2000
director
: Kinji Fukasaku
script : Kenta Fukasaku, based on novel by Koshun Takami
cinematography : Katsumi Yanagashima
editing : Hirohide Abe
music : Masamichi Amano
lead actors : Takeshi Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto
105-118 minutes
Battle
Royale may be this year’s best comedy – but it could have been so
much more. All the makings of a genuinely great, subversive, kickass
mindfuck of a movie are here, so it’s frustrating to watch the finished
product take the cop-out route when push comes to shove. The set-up isn’t
especially original, giving a Lord of the Flies twist to the game-of-death
subgenre of The Running Man, Cube and, most recently, Daniel
Minahan’s grotesquely underrated Series
7 : The Contenders. This kill-or-be-killed bloodline traces back
to 1932’s man-hunt classic The Most Dangerous Game (aka Hounds
of Zaroff) - seldom seen these days but still wildly influential,
it seems.
This
latest update sees 40 Japanese teenagers embark on a ‘class trip,’ only
to wake up on an isolated island where they’re forced to play ‘Battle
Royale.’ Introduced – they’re told - as a response post-millennial social
breakdown in Japan, this is a game with simple rules: after three days,
there must be only one survivor. Each kid is issued with a bag of supplies
including a ‘weapon’ – an axe, a pair of binoculars, a pot lid – and sent
out to fend for themselves. All have been fitted with an electronic collar
which can be exploded by remote control if they break the rules - or if,
at the end of three days, there’s more than one survivor. The ‘game’ is
supervised by a sardonic teacher – Kitano’s character shares the actor’s
name – who broadcasts the latest death toll via tannoy every three hours.
Battle
Royale contains one truly outstanding scene, when Kitano breezily
informs the kids about their terrible by means of a ludicrously cheery
video presentation. This lengthy sequence, which includes two grisly deaths,
strikes a dazzling note of surreal, no-holds-barred nightmare worthy of
Michael Haneke’s stunning Funny
Games. It’s a clammily claustrophobic blend of savage horror
and absurd humour that only intermittently regains. For most of the remainder
Fukusaku (a seventysomething veteran) frustratingly torpedoes what should
and could have been a nerve-shredding exercise in delicious tension.
His
most disastrous error is his insistence on cutting away from the island
to flashbacks of the schoolkids’ previous, ‘normal’ lives. Fukusaku does
this again and again, with diminishing results – it’s is a lazy way of
imparting back-story characterisation which, in any case, Battle Royale
doesn’t really need. This also leads to the film being a good half-hour
longer than it should be – the comic-book tone of the material cries out
for slam-bang, no-nonsense pacing. And it certainly doesn’t call for the
relentless mood-music that underpins almost every scene, nor for the dragged-out
ending that dissipates into a series of dream/memory/fantasy epilogues.
It’s
also disappointing, given the gleeful anarchy that otherwise prevails,
to see the movie increasingly concentrating on the budding puppy-love
between Shuya (Fujiwara) and Noriko (Maeda), pretty much the most conventional
route it could have taken. The sardonic alternative is personified by
the film’s most intriguing character, Mitsuko (Kou Shibasaki), a demure-looking
girl who favours whimsical t-shirts with slogans like ‘A source of romance,’
but who amazes everyone by revealing killing-machine tendencies under
pressure – we find out exactly why in the one flashback that adds to our
understanding rather than getting in the way.
Of
all the ‘real’ students, it’s Mitsuko who turns out to be best suited
to the game’s savage demands – she’s much more convincing and thought-provoking
than her rival in the blood-letting stakes, ‘transfer student,’ Kiriyama
(Ando), an older teenager whose martial skills instantly mark him out
as an agents provocateur for the Battle Royale ‘management.’ He’s
nothing more than a hot-headed psychopath, wiping out contestant after
contestant with a sub-machinegun. The film generates much more terror
and humour when it’s just the kids themselves who are doing the killing,
as when a bunch of girls hiding out in a lighthouse suddenly veer from
cheery co-operation to nervy mutual suspicion to blood-thirsty megaviolence.
This is where Battle Royale hits the bullseye – taking the jealousies,
affections and insecuries of typical teenagers and exaggerating them into
epic, gore-splattered confrontations.
The
insertion of the outsider Kiriyama is typical of the uncertainty that
afflicts Battle Royale – a general shrinking back from what could
and should have been a truly nightmarish abyss. As it is, we’ve got plenty
of time to mull over the set-up’s shaky foundations: we’re never given
any convincing explanation for why the ‘Battle Royale’ law was introduced,
for instance, or what effect the bloodshed is supposed to have. In Series
7, everything was televised – but Battle Royale seems to take place
under conditions of total secrecy. How can the game have any impact
on wider society, when none of the kids seem to know anything about it
before their arrival on the island? The games are regular events – so
how come nobody notices that whole classes of schoolchildren are going
missing? Series 7 wasn’t exactly 100% convincing in terms of its
socio-political ‘back story,’ but got away with its gaps and inconsistencies
by presenting itself in terms of ‘found footage,’ with no ‘behind the
scenes’ context – Battle Royale has no such defence. But we shouldn’t
be too harsh – at its best, this relentlessly enjoyable movie reaches
peaks of thrilling audacity that most Western movies never even glimpse.
29th
September, 2001
(seen 28th September 2001, Hyde Park, Leeds – Leeds Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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