"Battle Royale" Beats Up Japan

When people complain about movie prices in North America I don't pay much attention. A regular movie ticket in Japan usually costs 1800 yen, or about CDN$22. Plus, most theatres aren't equipped with the digital sound systems you find in NA houses. To top it off, if a show is sold out they will continue to sell tickets for those who'd like to stand (for the same price of course). Needless to say, I don't go to see many films unless I can get a discount.

However, I did make a point to see Fukasaku Kinji's Battle Royale (Special Version). The concept of Battle Royale is brutally simple: once a year, a single Junior High School class in Japan is selected at random to play BR. They are loaded onto a bus, gassed, and whisked to a remote island where they are immediately given instructions (by Kitano 'Beat' Takeshi) on how to "play". Each student gets a rucksack containing supplies and a weapon. Over the next three days, they must use their brains and brawn to kill each other off until there is only one survivor -- the so called "winner".

Veteran director Fukasaku (of such well-known films as Black Lizard, Battles Without Honor, and the U.S. co-prod The Green Slime) has created a brilliant, visceral and emotional portrait of disenchanted Japanese teens. Superficially an action film with bucket-loads of gore and plenty of pyrotechnics, BR is a gripping snapshot of youth gone wild. The two main characters are played by teen heart-throb Fujiwara Tatsuya and his gf Maeda Aki. Their adolescent love and the lucidity with which they perceive the "game" is their salvation. The others aren't so lucky. The hysterical teens (the ones who don't end up killing themselves) wipe each other out with crossbows, knives, pistols, machine guns, scythes, poison, bombs, samurai swords and axes. If anyone tries to escape the island or ends up in a designated danger zone, the electronic dog collar around their neck detonates. Over the course of the three days, a microcosm of society forms: a small hosptial is set up in a lighthouse; the computer techies try to hack their way off the island; girls still do their makeup in the morning and some students try to act as peacekeepers. Interwoven in the film are flashbacks to some of the main character's lives. These often quick vignettes really ground the melodrama of the battle and inform the character's behaviour under pressure. I loved the editing of this movie! At the end of the film are three "requiems" which show what was extra in this version. I can't imagine it without. My favourite student was the super-deadly Mitsuko (played by Shibasaki Kou) who's furious dispensing of some of the more lecherous male students recalled the classic pinkueiga of the 60s.

Toei was very shrewd in releasing the special version of the film in March -- just in time for the graduating junior high school kids to be allowed to see it (BR was slapped with the little-used "R15"). Apparently, Miramax has picked up the NA rights to this gem. It remains to be seen how they'll recut it -- common protocol for their foreign language releases.