TETSUO: THE IRON MAN Movie Review

The Ironman

Well, here's something you don't see every day (though the film is so successful at what it does that I feared we might). Thematically, Tetsuo is a movie that seems a natural progression of all fears modern: man's gradual loss of his humanity, his enslavement to technology, his fears of disease, plus the particularly Japanese obsession and dread surrounding the subject of mutation. On a visual level, however, Tetsuo is—quite literally—something else. Shinya Tsukamoto's instant cult classic is the story of a white-collar worker (Tomoroh Taguchi) who discovers that he's being transformed bit by bit into a walking collection of metallic cables, drills, wires, and gears. In an homage to Fernando Rey's remark to Catherine Deneuve that “some men would find you even more attractive now” as he strokes her newly attached artificial leg in Buñuel's Tristana, the newly formed metal man finds himself confronted by a bizarre metals fetishist (played by the director in what I'd have to call an homage to himself). Tetsuo is amusing, disgusting, and beautifully crafted, but so unengaging on a narrative level that even at 67 minutes, it feels like an ordeal. (The sequel, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, must have been what Tsukamoto was after the first time. The sequel is visually spectacular—this time in color—and it's hung on a stronger narrative core. It's still mighty grotesque stuff, but it's also a one-of-a-kind, visionary work.)

NEXT STOP … Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, Videodrome, The Fly (1986)

1992 67m/B JP Tomoroh Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Shinya Tsukamoto; D: Shinya Tsukamoto; W: Shinya Tsukamoto; C: Shinya Tsukamoto; M: Chu Ishikawa. VHS FXL