Shinya Tsukamoto
Kotoko

Kotoko opens with the backlit image of a charming little girl dancing joyfully to the playful notes of a xylophone, by the sea. An abrupt cut, the camera is seized by frantic convulsions, and we hear the anguished and piercing screams of a woman off-screen. The little girl is gone.
Just a few minutes of this preface are enough to frame Shinya Tsukamoto's twelfth feature film from a thematic and stylistic perspective. Kotoko is indeed a film that manages to combine the most opposite emotional polarities within its images: tenderness and despair, joy and sorrow, sweetness and horror, perfectly adapting its style to expressive needs. A clinical investigation and analysis of a soul torn and ravaged by a profound inner dichotomy, Kotoko ends up assuming the same bifid nature of its subject, and the abrupt stylistic shifts are the most obvious consequence of this duality.
We thus have on one side relaxed and at ease sequences, splendid multiple dissolves creating evocative frames in which different images magically coexist in the same space, long takes with pastel tones or anyways a clean, composed editing, and on the other, sudden explosions of directorial schizophrenia achieved through the uncontrollable and convulsive tremors of the camera, the use of sudden zooms and skewed perspectives, the deafening distortion of sound, and a syncopated, tumultuously agitated editing, essentially all the stylistic hallmarks that have always characterized Shinya Tsukamoto's way of filmmaking.
Yet here we are distant from the hallucinatory and nihilistic neurasthenia of the historical Tsukamoto, from the Cronenbergian matrix cyberpunk nightmares of cult films like Tetsuo: the horrendous bodily mutations bringing man and machine, flesh and metal, to merge in aberrant symbiosis are absent, the brilliant yet still unripe experimentalism gives way to images of refined beauty, to a fully mature language. Wanting to make a comfortable comparison with the filmography of David Lynch, one could liken the relationship between Tetsuo and Kotoko to that between Eraserhead and Mulholland Dr.
Not that the director has softened his usual violence over the years, quite the contrary: Kotoko boasts deeply disturbing sequences, even on the most purely visual level, including scenes of self-inflicted torture, faces swollen and dripping with blood, and a series of various types of infanticide, particularly the explosion in extreme close-up of a baby's head in Scanners style. And that's no small feat...
The fact is that here the violence is no longer simply externalized in shockingly concrete and tangible forms like, say, the transformation of a penis into a drill. Even taking into account those grand guignol sequences that are not lacking, Kotoko is from this point of view an extremely violent film, but it is a violence all internalized within the protagonist, which can manifest itself in the simple act of cooking, in a look rather than in a way of walking or positioning (only to then emerge in the open, revealing itself as such in sudden outbursts of hysteria, hence the stylistic duality previously mentioned), violence that ultimately reveals itself as a consequence of an existential condition.
Kotoko tells the story of despair, the banal and terrible despair of simply existing. The eponymous protagonist is prey to an anguishing insecurity that entirely involves her relationship with the outside world, suffering from an inability to discern and orient herself, which translates for her into a total absence of solid points of reference to lean on in the daily struggle to live.
Metaphorically, this existential inability is rendered through the idea of schizoid discomfort with double vision: Kotoko perceives the world as split in two, and whenever a stranger appears, they are accompanied by a fictitious double, fruit of her imagination, typically showing hostility towards her, plunging her into doubt and dismay. Therefore, Kotoko habitually cuts herself, the only way left for her to assure herself she is alive in a disorienting world that ends up questioning her very existence.
The only moments of respite from this constant suffering are the emotional musical interludes in which, abstracting herself from reality and losing herself in dreams of distant lands, Kotoko (superbly played by Japanese singer Cocco in her first acting role, practically never neglected by the camera) illusorily reconciles with the world, which returns to being one and singular for a brief time. Even visits to her family seem to coincide with the recovery of a serenity now irretrievably lost, and all the suffering seems to vanish suddenly before the normalcy of small things, but it takes little for the woman to sink back into her paranoid, self-destructive delusions.
The situation seems to finally reach a turning point when a writer character (played by Tsukamoto himself, as usual) comes into play and falls in love with Kotoko's fragility. Overcoming her initial resistance, he manages to get reciprocated, with the intention of saving her. Thus, there is also room for a touching love story, filled with mortiferous and violent impulses, made of delirious skirmishes and domestic torture (the man voluntarily subjects himself to them to prevent Kotoko from directing them at herself), but for the first time, the woman seems truly happy, and her world reassembled. However, suddenly the man vanishes, and we understand that it was only, or partly, one of Kotoko's usual hallucinations. From here to the bitter, splendid finale, it will be a crescendo of madness.
At this point, it is necessary to mention a key element so far unmentioned: the protagonist is indeed a mother. She loves her child with all her heart, yet the experience of motherhood is described by the film as an oppressive, if not anguishing burden, a weight further aggravating her existential anxieties. Unable to take care even of herself, Kotoko doesn't know how to provide for a few-months-old child: she sees dangers everywhere, is paralyzed by doubt when the child doubles before her eyes, finding herself a very fragile defense against the brutality of the world. In the end, to prevent the world from overwhelming him, she will make the paradoxical decision to smother him in his sleep with her own hands, in one of the most horrific and emotionally devastating scenes I have ever witnessed.
From what has been said so far, the distance of this film from the icy coldness and death of emotion that constitute Cronenberg's cinema is clear. Rather, we are in the realm of a cinema shaken by powerful emotional tremors, violent manifestations of inner suffering: the first two examples that come to mind are early Kim Ki-duk (the one from The Isle, to be specific, whose protagonist opened her mouth only once throughout the film and only to let out a cry of harrowing pain) and especially Andrzej Zulawski (the dynamics between the two main characters, although differently motivated, the protagonist's psychology, the hysterical outbursts sometimes reminded me of those in Possession).
While continuing to consistently pursue a precise authorial discourse and maintaining many of his formal characteristics unchanged, Shinya Tsukamoto seems to have matured with Kotoko a shift of interest from flesh to mind and from body to soul, bringing to fruition a process already budding in a work such as A Snake of June, in which the two themes were perfectly balanced.

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