Young, cheerless insurance salesman Tsuda shares a Tokyo apartment with his fiance Hizuru. One day he bumps into his childhood friend Kojima, now a semi-professional boxer, who invites himself to their apartment and, finding Kojima alone, comes on to her. Initially she rejects his advances, but following an argument with Tsuda over just what happened between her and Kojima and a fight that Tsuda spectacularly loses, Hizuru moves in with the boxer. Humiliated by the beating and the loss of his girlfriend, Tsuda also takes up boxing, convinced he can eventually win Hizuru back.

All of which sounds very straightforward stuff, a familiar tale of troubled relationships and rediscovering self-esteem, and indeed in other hands it may well have been, but as directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, one of Japan's most ferociously creative yet (at least in the West) undervalued auteurs, this almost soap-like plot becomes the foundation for one of the director's most direct explorations of his favourite themes of obsession, humiliation, liberation and bodily destruction.

If you've never encountered a Tsukamoto film - and few fans of Outsider cinema can not have seen his astonishing debut feature Tetsuo (1988) - then try to imagine a marriage between David Cronenberg, David Lynch and a bucket of amphetamine sulphate, coloured with a splash of Jan Svankmajer. The tone is set in the manic pre-credits sequence, as boxers frantically work out to the beat of a furious techno-rock soundtrack and a fist, held aloft against a jolting cityscape, punches into the camera through layers of meat and gristle. None of this is there purely for decoration - boxing, meat and even the city itself play key roles in the story that follows.

Like the aforementioned North American directors, Tsukamoto never tries to fool you into believing that you are watching a straightforward drama before pulling the narrative rug from beneath - his deliberately twitchy shooting and editing style create a sense of a world one step away from reality from the off. Tsukamoto's Tokyo is an unsettling place where office blocks seem to visibly radiate an oppressive force, one that has the power to crush the spirit of the ordinary salaryman, a potent metaphor in a society that still places a high value on conformity and the work ethic. Tsukamoto himself plays Tsuda as a man whose life is all routine and no spark, a joyless and downtrodden product of corporate society. He and Hizuru spend their evenings in front of the TV, mindlessly watching old movies and failing to communicate on any meaningful level, but the arrival of Kojima on the scene changes all that. At first playfully mischievous, he deliberately provokes a physical confrontation with Tsuda that as a professional boxer he knows he will win. It's a scene of vicious physicality that is the turning point for the narrative and for the three main characters - Tsuda is badly beaten and humiliated and Kojima is transformed into a screaming, out-of-control animal, while the incident awakens in Hizuru a hitherto unrealised fascination with physical violence.

From this point on the storyline is of secondary concern as Tsukamoto embarks on a sometimes disturbing but often electriifying exploration of dark obsession and the corruption of the body, usually through violent means. If Kojima is the initial catalyst, the seeds are already being sown before his arrival - Tsuda's job and relationship are in a state of of stagnation, his father is withering away in hospital, and a chance encounter with the rotting, maggot-infested corpse of a cat trigger in him an immediate response that goes beyond simple revulsion. Following the confrontation with Kojima, both Tsuda and Hizuru are gradually but drastically transformed: Tsuda trains ferociously for an unofficial rematch with Kojima, building himself into a destructive if undisciplined fighting machine, while Hizuru finds a release for her own obsessions through a series of increasingly extreme, self-inflicted body piercings. But Tsuda is not a Japanese Rocky Balboa - his intentions, it is revealed, have as much to do with betrayal and self-loathing as with revenge, and Tsuda's wild determination to hurt Kojima is balanced by a need to punish himself. Thus he is able to momentarily re-unite with Hizuru only by allowing her to beat his already bruised face into a swollen and bloodied mess.

The film also uses the development of its main characters to deal with issues of identity and changing demands of gender roles, a theme that has particular resonance given the film's setting and country of origin. Tsuda is a mundane office worker whose warrior instincts, buried by his everyday urban existence, are re-awakened by Kojima, and through boxing he re-discovers what he believes is the lost essence of his own manhood, a theme that was later explored (or perhaps, given the current Hollywood trend for borrowing from Eastern cinema, reworked) by David Fincher in Fight Club. However, Where Fincher's film climaxes in a (re-) awakening of the self against a backdrop of society in disarray, Tsukamoto's characters explode in an orgy of rage-fueled self-annihilation - of the body, of the spirit and in one case seemingly of their very existence. It's a breathtaking, cinematic knock-out punch from a film that, in typical Tsukamoto style, assaults its audience in a way that is supremely satisfying and more than a little exciting - as with Tsuda, the harder the blows fall, the greater the desire to be hit.

Sound and Vision