In an alternate universe Tokyo that looks like a 1980’s cult
film’s vision of 2015 – all neon, leather, and garbage – neighborhoods are
controlled by a motley collection of creative gangs. Some are relatively benign
– unruly party animals. Others are straight up nasty – running brothels,
kidnapping slaves, and indulging in some cannibalism. This is the world of Tokyo Tribe, first a manga by Santa
Inoue, now the latest manic genre explosion from Japanese provocateur Sion
Sono. His eccentric previous films include Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, a gory
amateur-filmmakers-caught-in-a-real-Yakuza-war action comedy, and Love Exposure, a four-hour coming-of-age
epic featuring Catholicism, cults, and upskirt photography. There’s no
one else quite like Sono in cinema today, or ever for that matter. His latest
is glowing kitsch, a gang warfare hip-hop musical that makes most pre-fab
midnight movie cult items look sane and stately. Lesser films try too hard to
be strange. For Sono it comes naturally, energetically, and extravagantly.
Like an alien studied our pop culture for decades and
regurgitated it back in a two-hour kaleidoscope, Tokyo Tribe is exhausting and entertaining in equal measure, a
collection of influences adding up to one nutty vision. It’s anime and MTV, Blade Runner and Speed Racer, Takashi Miike and Robert Rodriguez, The Warriors and the Step Ups in a blender missing its lid,
spraying vibrant nonsense in every direction, dripping demented glee. On
rain-soaked trashy streets is Show (Shôta Sometani), a hoodie-wearing
MC/narrator who raps out some mad exposition, telling us about gangs – stoners,
go-go dancers, gangsta rappers, and so on – who control various districts. The
worst of the worst is a brute (Riki Takeuchi), who rules from a gold-plated
mansion where he gnaws on severed fingers he stores in a cigar box. He has a
son (Ryôhei Suzuki) who struts around
showing off his toned body in thongs or shirtless under fur coats, and is
about to stir up some inter-gang conflict. After an hour or so of setup, it’s
war, with one gang angling to rule them all, or crush Tokyo on the way down.
A wild and occasionally incomprehensible trip, the movie has
brain-melting qualities. It’s an imaginative world unto itself full of fog and
fireworks, earthquakes, human furniture, a beatboxing maid, a little old lady DJ,
a creepy van with skull-studded chandeliers mounted on its side mirrors, disco-ball
samurai armor, a pistol-shaped cell-phone, katanas, bejeweled machine guns,
holograms, a kung fu kid, a glowing tank, confetti, bottle rockets, and penis
envy. And that’s just scratching the surface. Sono makes dense frames,
sometimes cutting like crazy between oddball imagery, other times floating
through elaborate sets and choreography in deceptively fluid long takes as
likely to capture a dance battle as a real battle. It’s the sort of movie where
a boy can pick a lock by breakdancing. His white-clad virginal sister (Nana
Seino) has been kidnapped by nasty slimeballs and held captive in a brothel.
Later she’s rescued by a nice guy (Young Dais), the leader of a horned-up, but
peace-loving, gang headquartered out of a Denny’s knockoff called Penny’s.
Yeah. It’s that sort of movie.
Sono lingers over naked bodies and violence in equally prurient
ways, eager to watch a gang member trace a map on a captive policewoman’s taut
bare midriff, admiring bikinis and blood-soaked swords with the same gaze. He lets
each tribe rap at the camera, introducing themselves through bravado while
posing in their grubby districts like they’re in post-apocalyptic music videos. Our big bad spits rhymes at us while slicing off a man’s ear,
blood spurting out like the final percussive mic drop. And that’s just the
first ten minutes. Riotous swings between cornball comedy, martial arts action,
and exploitation ogling are held in check by the non-stop thumping hip-hop
beat, every line spat with a rapping patter. It’s a chaotic movie, set over the
course of one eventful night racing through the Tokyo Tribes. But it takes a
lot of formal control to make something so exuberantly nonsensical.
Admittedly, all the above sounds like a mess – uneven, scary,
and weird, impossible to take seriously and probably offensive. That’s not an
unfair characterization. Its narrative is slack, and the novelty threatens to
wear off. And yet there’s an animating spirit of knockabout joy, reveling in
messed up images and unpredictable schlock. Sono conducts a movie that’s all
setup, then all finale, moving only in grand swooping motions. It’s a musical.
It’s a kung fu movie. It’s an acrobatic battle royale and a surreal rap battle
rolled up in a story of swirling exaggerated silly stupidity. And yet everyone
involved is committed. They mean it. They feel it. The performers are great
aesthetic presences, tough and pretty every one. The fights have balletic
slicing and flipping. The rapping has a pulsing splatter to match the gore.
It’s chaos, and in the end it’s ear-splitting noise and eye-searing color
burning a hole in the screen. What’s this wild gang violence amount to? “Sheer
nonsense!” one character shouts late in the film, adding, “That’s what war is!”
Tokyo Tribe: the first anti-war
hip-hop kung fu musical. It’s too much, and that’s the point.
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