Bullet Ballet

Year of release: 1998
Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Genre: Crime/Drama/Thriller
Duration: 87 min
Language: Japanese (English subtitles)

Imdb

In this incredibly stylish, dark and subtly violent movie, Tsukamoto takes a black look at three entirely disparate generations and finds each lacking. It's like a human food chain: the young characters in Bullet Ballet are mainly gang members or prostitutes, unmotivated drug-addled slackers looking to make easy money through crime and violence, and who have no morals, are utterly bored with life and have no future to look forward to except to grow up, if they're lucky, into salarymen; the middle-aged group are slaves to business, empty suits who are rich pickings for the youths to prey on, and who don't understand anything about society except keeping the boss happy; and the older generation, in which the youths class the hero of the piece, Goda (continually calling him 'ojisan', or 'old man', even though Tsukamoto was only 38 when he made this movie), who are so out of it they are completely irrelevant and utterly laughable.

Bullet Ballet has a stylised, unreal, grainy, heavily-contrasted look redolent of the true classics of 40's film noir, replete with femmes fatales, chisel-jawed heroes and evil villains, with stunning composition, kinetic action interspersed with amazing, pure silence and slowness, and incredible attention to detail in its use of close-ups. Just like his previous movie Tetsuo: The Iron Man, you could take every single frame of this film as a beautiful image on its own. And yet the style is occasionally so starkly frenetic, so fresh and exciting it's literally breathtaking.

There are contrasting scenes of such hyperactivity that it's hard to make out what's happening, as well as long, exquisite sequences of slow, loving detail - for instance, when the protagonist Goda finally gets his hands on a gun and simply sits and stares at it, turning the bullets over in his fingertips, then recreates his lover's suicide by gunshot in the exact spot she died in, reliving the death of the only thing which has ever mattered to him, it's not only pure and beautiful art, it's intensely moving and deeply desolate. And some of the slow-motion shots of fighting are literally as elegantly balletic as the title of the movie suggests. - Snowblood Apple

Full review here.

Highly recommended. Despite being a relatively new movie it's in black and white. :3

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Subtitles.

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