God bless Shin'ya Tsukamoto. Since bursting on the scenes with TETSUO:THE IRON MAN he has been making films that confound the audience and bludgeon them into stunned silence (in a good way). I have attended several of his films when they screened at Festivals over the years and you always could feel the audience being worked over by the cinematic treats. SHADOW OF FIRE is no exception.
The plot of the film concerns a young woman running a burned out bar in the days after the end of the Second World War. She serves her customers food and drink and some times herself. She is nominally protected by a pimp who is never really around. She begins to form a loose family with an orphan and a broken young soldier who doesn’t try and sleep with her. As events go on as the orphan gets mixed up with a young man of questionable morals.
I’m not going to go into more detail because the plot will sound broken, and like the people it depicts it kind of is, but at the same time it is emotionally true. Tsukamoto is telling us a story that isn’t really about the “narrative” but the emotional and mental journey of the characters. Its operating in a realm that is beyond words and so trying to use them to explain it will make it seem less than it is.
SHADOW OF FIRE is going to rock you. It’s an off kilter little mind bomb about the effect of war on those who lived it. It is not a shiny happy film about how when the war ended things went back to normal, instead it is a long pained scream into the darkness about how the trauma lives on forever after the bombs stop falling and the bullets stop flying. It’s a look at the psychic and emotional damage that living under threat of war does to us. It's a crushing film that makes you feel and begin to understand the destruction the leaders ever consider.
This film will leave you broken.
If you can score manage to beg borrow or steal a ticket to the sold out Japan Cuts screening I highly recommend you go.
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