Love WIll Tear Us Apart: Vital (2004)

March 6, 2012 Love Will Tear Us Apart No Comments

Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Nami Tsukamoto, Kiki
Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto
Country: Japan
Genre: Drama | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review of Vital is a part of Rowena’s coverage of the 6th Annual Globus Film Series at the Japan Society in New York, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Watching a Tsukamoto Shinya film is always a challenging experience because his work often stretches out to unheard-of philosophical and physical extremes. If “Human character is not a constant,” as one character states in Vital, nevertheless Tsukamoto’s themes of psycho-sexual bodily harm and torment, in some cases self-inflicted, and testing the limits of the body and machine and where the twain meet in grotesque fashion, are surprisingly regular and uniform. Even in this consistency Tsukamoto surprises, for the myriad ways in which he has presented his themes and own interpretation of body horror. Vital is no exception, but at the same time, as with each of Tsukamoto’s films, remains unique from the rest.

As morbid as it may sound, with the help of an understated collective performance from his cast, led by Asano, Tsukamoto explores the troubling boundaries between life and death, memory and imagination and beyond, and desire and obsession, past and present and beyond.

Hiroshi (Asano Tadanobu) has survived a car crash and currently suffers from amnesia. However, he begins to recall his life, including his medical studies. He decides to take them up again and through them, unwittingly plunges into his past with his former, now deceased lover Ryoko. How he plunges into his past with Ryoko is precisely on the dissection table. Hiroshi gradually realises that his assigned cadaver is nothing less than that of Ryoko. As morbid as it may sound, with the help of an understated collective performance from his cast, led by Asano, Tsukamoto explores the troubling boundaries between life and death, memory and imagination and beyond, and desire and obsession, past and present and beyond. Through this narrative, Tsukamoto also contributes in his own way to discussions of mourning, with the possibility of mourning only through the self-inflicted wound that is remembering and getting into the deepest part of oneself, removed from social, customary ties of family, friends, and school. These things happen to Hiroshi, propelled by his own volition but also by the power of coincidence that brought Ryoko’s body to him. As a result, Vital is a very insular world whose locations are limited to the dissection tables at the medical college; Hiroshi’s ashen-coloured apartment; Ryoko’s parents’ home, where death and memory permeate; and a seemingly interminably rain-soaked cityscape. In addition to these settings is that of the seaside, where Hiroshi meets up with Ryoko, either in his imagination, dream, or beyond. However, a very strange love triangle occurs at the point where life and death meet, between Hiroshi, his classmate Ikumi, who sits across from him at the same dissection table and is in love with him, and Ryoko with her body on the table between them.

Though not wholly successful in terms of the intensity of its impact, Vital is a worthwhile cinematic work of boundaries transgressed, death in desire and vice-versa, and the power of subjectivity. It is also compelling with regards to its use of water as a somewhat critical element in presenting these ideas and establishing mood. Water here plays a role in the activation of memory, in the representation of human in/constancy even beyond death, and as a context of mourning and letting go.

75/100 ~ GOOD. Though not wholly successful in terms of the intensity of its impact, Vital is a worthwhile cinematic work of boundaries transgressed, death in desire and vice-versa, and the power of subjectivity.

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