Not quite 5 plus... unless its out of six

Survival Style 5+
directed by: Gen Sekiguchi
120 min, 35 mm, Japanese and English, w English subtitles

I stumbled across this a little while ago and never watched it. After watching it, I’m stumbling for ways to describe it. Think vignette films, like Happiness or Coffee and Cigarettes. Mix this with mindblowing Japanese pop-culture décor. Make the dialogue obtuse. Add Tadanobu Asano (infamously known for playing Kakihara from Ichi the killer) and Vinnie Jones. Then pray that things get very very weird. But don’t worry – its supposed to be a straight-up comedy.

Sometimes in the surreal, the beauty comes from the face-value. The need not to explain nor understand – just accept what is going on. This is something at which the film excels with its unusual subjects. A worker wins tickets to a kitsch hypnotist called Viva Friends. The bipolar assassin (Jones) kills the hypnotist on stage just as the worker is hypnotised to be a bird. An advertising exec keep on thinking up warped and (remember this is Japanese too – crazy means just that). A man repeatedly kills his wife, only to find her alive again, often with added powers (missile arms for one). A gang of burglars, whilst breaking and entering, deal with suppressed homosexual feelings for each other.

Some of the sketches have an inconsequential relationtionship with another, much like those of Amorres Perros. All of them are abstract in notion but each plays linearly, to a seemingly natural conclusion. This film doesn’t try and disorientate or confuse the viewer with more twists and abstractions that the start. All the disorientating, vibrant, effervescent madness seems normal by the time it peaks with Cake’s cover of “I will Survive.” You don’t feel cheated and confused by some avant-nonsense – just laughing and entertained and something that in the end was just a great, but odd, film.

4/5