Yutaka Tsuchiya
Peep "TV" Show

"Do you know what's happening out there?"

"Of course, I watch television!"

It happens rarely, but when it does, it’s a beautiful thing. My suppressed desire for films, held back by various and urgent commitments, bursts out during these couple of days of absolute idleness. During these quiet periods, anything can happen at a cinematic level. Like, in full horror style, finding a completely unknown film on the hard drive that you don’t even remember obtaining, like those untitled family videocassettes. When this happens, you must bow before the unknown and embrace it: it is always a sign of destiny.

So.

Peep "TV" Show.

Year 2004.

Directed by Yutaka Tsuchiya.

An hour and forty minutes that sweeps you away like a raging river. And then, the void. I love how some films completely elude the concept of categorization, immediately challenging possible discussions about them, reviews, or even just judgments. And precisely for this reason, my writing will appear chaotic, poorly structured (because, after all, chaos is the very spirit of the film), in an attempt to list, explain, and recommend. Especially since it's an unknown film, I should strive, squeeze my brain, try to connect all the ideas as if they could engage any kind of readers. I will try, but the failure will be total. Because Peep "TV" Show is a film that fully exploits its nature as a cinematic object (much like Joyce's "Ulysses" is total in its being a literary medium) to the point of making it difficult to talk about.

If one could give a genre coordinate, that would be "psychological documentary", but we would still be on reductive territory. What is certain is that it is one of the most ingenious and complex films I’ve seen in quite a few years, a surprising reflection on the reality-fiction relationship, the image-private conflict, as well as not-so-subtle metacinema.

A complex network of characters and acts of vandalism to tell us that, deep down, we want our lives to become the new 9/11. And is that all? No. The portraits of people that emerge are as bleak and empty as those in Kurosawa's "Pulse." Only there, there was the excuse that they were ghosts trapped between here and there, here there are living people. Living and false, thus very real.

There are two characters we will follow more often: on one side, there is an apathetic and dull punk with the obsession of clashing with the TRUE reality. On the other, a girl who dresses up as a lolita, entering an inner war fought between her true self (destined for death) and the mask of appearance. The two protagonists are connected through the peeptvshow site, which allows you to spy on common people during their daily activities: stops in public bathrooms, pedicures, naps, dinners, domestic cries.

The brilliance of the film, its concept of media spectacle and time as a commodity (Yutaka demonstrates a good understanding of Guy Debord) pours into the use of the cinematic medium, pure imagery destined to create topoi, status symbols, and emotions to sell. There's one scene, in particular, that is particularly illustrative: the gothic lolita girl who finds herself with other girls like her, all façade and little substance. One of them states that, to get back to her ideal weight, she runs every night for an hour. We will see this girl several times in jogging attire, in close-up, running with despair and fatigue on her face. The banality of existence becomes pure spectacle: inserted in the montage, this scene – with no apparent narrative logic – creates suspense, tension, suggesting that the lives of the characters, even in their most normal actions, open innumerable Chinese boxes through which the film constructs itself with an almost Lynchian approach to cinema.

An anarchic, jumbled way of filmmaking, where even the use of distorting lenses (especially fish-eye), an amateurish and gritty photography and deliberately naive editing contribute to a life destined for staging. The spirit is punk, but also existential, somewhat like those revolutionary films that Masao Adachi shot in the '70s.

And what about the acting? The acting accentuates the falsity of the documentary's nature: a cinematic genre with the "presumption" of depicting reality, when something being filmed (even if it’s a wedding video) always becomes false, even if only because it’s experienced in a time that’s not the "here and now." The characters act overtly, sometimes looking at the camera and speaking mechanically, as if they had memorized the text. Other times, they directly read their lines.

"At this moment everyone is watching me. I am lying on the bed and looking at the ceiling. I don’t know what to do. I think of all those people watching me. I wonder what they want: perhaps they want something more engaging, more intense."

Yutaka investigates today's society, immersed in a "fake" soul, so adrift it can only live by consuming images. False and therefore very true, because our lives lose meaning in the face of total involvement in the lives of others. Because reality is much more fascinating than lies, but we know it is terribly boring. And when one’s life becomes the new 9/11, one can also die. Because you can’t go beyond: it’s tragic reality that immediately becomes merchandise, collective trauma, pure cinema.

I dare say: masterpiece, and also one of the most unexpectedly beautiful films I’ve seen this year.

And when it happens by pure chance, it's even more beautiful.