shabondama elegy
hard to watch but a masterpiece!, 4 April 2002
10/10
Author: ben morris (shiryuo) from munich, germany
okay, i’ve seen this film only on video, so i don’t know how/if it works on a big screen. anyway, shabondama elegy is something really unique, a crazy mixture of yakuza and romance filled with strange colours, cutting techniques and inventive camera angles; like Ian Kerkhof is as usual. the story is really hard to follow, it took me 5 times watching it and i’m still not sure if i understood everything. the film’s beginning is quite normal though. tom hoffmann is arrested by the cops in tokyo (probably because of drugs) and by a chance he manages to escape. after picking up a girl (mai hoshino)in a nightclub in shinjuku, he stays at her place because the cops and the yakuza are both after him. at this point, the film gets really hard to watch, ian kerkhof does his best to deconstruct the storyline and alienates the images in any possible way. in the end, jack gets shot. sounds a bit spoiling now but it’s not really because you see the showdown already in the first 10 minutes, so you know the end in advance even before you’ve seen the whole. sometimes you see keiko (mai hoshino)telling her story as if it was a flashback, the film ends with the opening sequence. it’s like david lynch with a videocam dropping acid in tokyo, the film is free of any clichés and conventions, it should be considered like abstract video art. you just can’t put it in any category, and i think this is what ian kerkhof intended. already because of this, the film gets 10 to 10, it is something i haven’t seen before. and i’ve seen lots of betacam-trash films. o.k. the sound recording isn’t the best and the dialogues are senseless, but there is still ian kerkhof’s brillant camera work and a very well told, lyrical story. i liked it specially because of its ambition to create something new. i think it must be considered from this point of view. so i suggest to watch it for a second time and again and again, you’ll always gonna find something new.
this review originally published on imdb.com
September 3rd, 2006 at 8:09 pm
If you want,you can also read the french translation of this article in my personnal site. Dionysos