Survival with Style and Substance

When directors of television commercials and/or music videos make the transition to feature films, the end result is, more often than not, pretty pictures with a storyline suitable only for the short-attention span set. In Japan it's no different, and the recent crop of films from ad-men-turned-director have been little more than gorgeous looking ads writ large (Casshern, The Hotel Venus). Yet the recent paring of director Gen Sekiguchi with screenwriter Taku Tada has resulted in one of the most original and beautiful debuts in some - the twisted comedy with the odd title, Survive Style 5+. Though both Sekiguchi and Tada come from an advertising background, their award-winning commercials (or CM, as known in Japan) have a particularly surreal edge to them, including a brilliant CM for Boss7 Coffee that has a simple conversation between a man and a woman escalating into an international political incident. Survive Style 5+ consists of five parallel storylines that are loosely tied together, with the common thread being an English hitman (Vinnie Jones) who poses the same question to everyone he meets - "What is your function in life?" Tada's characters are all wonderfully eclectic, and they include a narcissistic hypnotist who irreversibly turns a salaryman into a bird, a high-strung ad executive (Kyôko Koizumi) who comes up with increasingly outlandish (and hysterically funny) ideas for commercials, and a team of bumbling burglars that harbor secret desires for each other. Of the five stories, the best (by far) is the tale of a murdering husband (Tadanobu Asano) and his wife (the stunning Reika Hashimoto) who refuses to remain dead. Simply stated, Survive Style 5+ is a feast for the eyes. The Japan in this film is one of Swiss-style chalets and pink houses decked out in Christmas lights, with rooms awash in Technicolor rainbows, strewn with the kitsch and tchotchkes of a thousand yard sales. Clearly, an incredible amount of time and effort was spent on the design of the film, and it really pays off. And while much of the camerawork can be said to belong to the post-Tarantino school, there's a lot more to the film than style and flash -- certainly enough to justify the two-hour running time (rare for a comedy).

Sekiguchi sprinkles the film with a small handful of pop-culture references - enough to be clever, but not to the point of turning into a PoMo orgy of influences. Some are explicit (Kubrick is name-checked, and there's a dinner table scene that is Ozu by way of Vincent Gallo) while others merely hinted at (Tadanobu Asano's Buick station wagon can only be a nod to Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy). Yet what's refreshing about Survive Style 5+ is that instead of the cool, ironic distance often associated with films such as this, Sekiguchi turns it into a somewhat touching, warm-hearted (albeit absurdist) affair. The highlight of the film is the aforementioned husband and wife story. Told with virtually no dialog, Asano proves himself quite the comic actor, and his reactions to each successive resurrection contain elements found in classic silent-comedy. As the equally silent wife, Hashimoto is impressive in her various (re)incarnations -- whether a master of martial arts (complete with wire work), a fire-breathing punk princess, or simply a demure housewife, she's incredibly graceful throughout. As if the five storylines weren't enough, Sekiguchi still manages to slip in a few extra scenes with unrelated characters that turn out to be some of the funniest, including a brutally honest schoolteacher who criticizes the artwork of her eight year-old students, or Sonny Chiba plying a hen-pecked CEO. Unfortunately, some of the other plotlines are given short shrift as a result, and one can only wonder how much footage was left on the cutting room floor. Survive Style 5+ is a rare thing -- a black comedy that is justifiably uplifting. A film that on one hand mocks certain genres (particularly the Japanese family dramedy) while at the same time playing into convention. A violent film with heart, a surreal fantasy brimming with style and originality, and a laugh-out-loud comedy that you can watch again and again.