964 Pinocchio 4K 1991

While for Americans the cyberpunk movie genre is clearly defined by blockbuster technogenic-computer hardware of the “matrix” type, the East has always followed a different and, in my opinion, much more interesting path. The Japanese have their own views and know-how in this field. And “Pinocchio” is just a model of such a “different” dirty art-house cyberpunk, emphasizing more on “punk” than on “cyber”.

I'll tell you right away that the film is neither stylistically nor visually similar to the cult “Tatsuo Iron Man”. Plot being a cyborg, Pinocchio in fact is not mechanized, and looks like a kind of moved brainless freak. He is really a very bright and unusual fool - I have never seen a character more convincing in his absolute insanity, so I was really impressed by Hage Suzuki, who played him. However, Himiko (Pinocchio's mentor, who was also his mother, if I understood the director's idea correctly), having completely lost her mind in the middle of the movie, did not yield to her partner's degree of insanity, and their duet was truly brain-destroying.

Actually, the first thing you pay attention to is the magnificent work of the cameraman. The angles are something. The beauty is indescribable. Comrades, working in the now fashionable “genre” of shooting on a hand-held video camera, should watch this movie (by the way, almost twenty years ago) and chew off their elbows with envy. Every single even the simplest scene, whether static or dynamic, is shot so competently and interestingly that it turns into a real work of cinematic art and a visual textbook for any operator. No exaggeration.

Plotwise, Fukui offers the viewer a kind of ordered chaos. It's hard to call it anything else. Despite the fact that this is a really clear, dark futuristic drama of “extra man”, in the events and actions of the characters there is consistency and logic, the surrealistic manner of presentation of the material (a la David Lynch's “Eraserhead”) is still very disorienting. This is naturally not criticism, but admiration and praise. It is problematic to think while watching it - the video sequence itself is too catching and does not let go. Actually, you don't even need to think - in the case of “Pinocchio”, you can just watch it and squint with pleasure. Or from disgust - it's closer to someone, although the movie is not scary at all. The usual methods of “scaring” are absent in it, and the harshness of some individual moments is determined by the above-mentioned surrealism of what is going on together with demonic editing

If we mark the key moments of the movie, the most powerful scenes are a few episodes with Himiko at the train station. Just in them the heavy dramatism of the so-called “loneliness in the crowd” simply goes off the scale and is remembered for a long time. And of course the calling card of “Pinocchio” - a mad Forrest Gump in chains rushing through the streets of the city - is a glamor and glitter that can be watched endlessly. By how mesmerizing this scene is, I would even compare it to the ending of “Zabriskie Point”, although it is certainly a drawn analogy, for which you should throw rotten tomatoes.

I'm gonna stop praising. I begin to scold, although there is nothing to scold for. I didn't like, perhaps, only the scenes in the basement, when the bad guys come to liquidate the unfortunate cyborg - this episode is too dark, drawn out and inexplicable. But I'm willing to forgive it, too, if it weren't for the denouement. It's a completely pointless finale that hits you over the head like a shoe on the head. What was the point of such a mockingly shoddy ending - what, one might ask, prevented Fukui from ending his story as transparently amorphous as in “Tatsuo”?

But anyway, the work is undoubtedly worthwhile, interesting and original even for its specific cyberpunk genre. Although those who are not potentially inclined to listen to screams and watch epileptic seizures for an hour and a half may not get into it.