Battle Royale ****
Dir: Kinji Fukasaku With: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto, Masanobu Ando, Kou Shibasaki, Takeshi Kitano
114 mins, cert 18
www.battle-royale.com
Picking a film of the week which is about the spectacle of violence is maybe a little obtuse. Real-life events in the United States have comprehensively outdistanced the cinema in terms of what this spectacle can do in terms of astonishment and horror. But as it happens, and for what it's worth, this week we have a movie about violence and the state; how the state reacts to it, and how it endorses retaliatory violence of its own.
Japanese cinema has recently given us some brilliant violent parables of cultural malaise - from the survivors of a bus hi-jacking in Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, to the sadistic fetish-princess of Takashi Miike's Audition. But neither has the effrontery and the sheer outrageousness of this extraordinary machine-tooled piece of provocation from veteran yakuza director Kinji Fukasaku. It's a futuristic nightmare; it's a satirical vision of Japan's fear and horror of its recalcitrant, disorderly younger generation; it's a pulp-sploitation shocker with guns, knives, blood and kinky school uniforms. But what it is most of all is violent: very, very violent, the kind of violence which is not ironised in the manner we have become accustomed to in the past 10 years, but presented in an eerily formal melodrama complete with stately, Kubrickian passages of pop classics on the soundtrack.
At some time in the future, Japan suffers a breakdown in law and order in parallel to the humiliating catastrophe of economic downturn. The young people, in particular, are out of control. So an embattled government passes the Battle Royale Act: a piece of legislation which means that a group of young people - and only young people - are forcibly marooned together on an island, and forced to kill each other until one survivor is left. Like Daniel Minahan's recent Series 7: The Contenders, or Norman Jewison's soon-to-be-remade Rollerball, it posits the fictional conceit of a violent game being at once the safety-valve for endemic violence and a violent response on the part of the government: an act of capital punishment, arbitrarily decided upon and sub- contracted to its victims by the state: they have to kill and terrify each other.
This year's Battle Royale class is nominated by a resentful, middle-aged teacher, whose class are absenting themselves from lessons - an unthinkable act of disobedience - and who is slashed in the thigh with a knife carried by one truant. There could be only one Japanese star to carry off this bizarre role, requiring as it does violence with black comedy and swaggering, opaque detachment. Takeshi Kitano is the teacher whose class heads off on a school trip and ends up kidnapped at gunpoint and taken to the island where their ordeal is to begin.
Kitano is scornful, furious, disapproving and droll all at once - a combination utterly unique to him - as he addresses the dumbstruck teenagers, who now have hi-tech bracelets fixed immovably around their necks, designed to explode at his whim, and otherwise to alert him to their whereabouts and health. Simply to terrify them (and us) he metes out some stomach-turning atrocities, before giving them each a little kit-bag containing food, water, a compass and a weapon of some sort, and turning them out to fend for themselves. Some defiantly refuse to take part in this grotesque theatre of humiliation, but others immediately start killing; the paranoia spreads like a virus and soon everyone realises that they must kill their friends to survive.
This accounts for the first reel of this movie, and it is a stunningly proficient piece of action film-making, plunging us into a world of delirium and fear. Arguably, the main body of the film can't quite live up to this bravura opening, but this is partly because the succeeding three days, in which the dwindling contestant numbers are periodically flashed up on screen like a scoreboard, are paradoxically concerned with the more subtle back-stories of the friendships, attractions, crushes and unrequited loves that emerge in this crucible of anxiety. Amidst the hail of bullets and the queasy gouts of blood, troubling narratives of yearning and sadness are played out. It is as if the violence of Battle Royale is not a satire of society at all, but simply a metaphor for the anguish of adolescent existence: a subject routinely sentimentalised or made the subject of nostalgic comedy, but here evoked with the un-anaesthetised pain with which it is actually experienced at the time.
A notable part of the Battle Royale is that it does not take place on television. The winner is excitably interviewed by TV news crews, but everything else happens far from the cameras: an emphatic turning-away from the "modernity" of violence, and a little perplexing. After all, everything happens on television, and every sport has mini-cameras secreted all over the field of play. So how can Battle Royale appal and pacify the populace if it doesn't happen on live television? Fukasaku appears to suggest that part of the game's power is its secrecy: like some strange newly invented ritual of adulthood, it is a blood-letting that happens far away from the rest of the tribe.
Some will find the explicit violence of this movie repulsive - or plain boring. But this is a film put together with remarkable confidence and flair. Its steely candour, and weird, passionate urgency make it compelling.