“Junk Food” looks at the unsavory aspects of life in Japan
By Sharael Feist
“Junk Food,” the latest film. from Japanese writer-director Masashi Yamamoto takes the viewer on a gruesome and graphic journey into a day in the life of a heroin addict, a tattoo artist, a Pakistani killer, gang members, and a female wrestler whose paths intertwine as they spiral toward destruction.
With its explicit scenes of violence and drug use, the film isn’t for everyone, but it is certainly an attention-getter with the glimpse it offers of a deviant side of society that people don’t generally associate with life in Japan.
Yamamoto, whose previous works include <i>Carnival in the Night</i>, <i>Robinson’s Garden</i>, and <i>Atlanta Boogie</i>, through a series of vignettes, provides a close-up look at degenerate people living lives of crime, immorality, and loneliness.
The film begins calmly with an elderly blind woman being awakened bv her alarm clock and partaking in her daily ritual of praying to Buddha. She embarks into the city to buy some bread, innocent (as symbolized, it seems, by her blindness) about the darker side of what exists there.
Her story gives way to the shocking tale of Miyuki, a successful career woman who sits in a
darkened, abandoned room, smoking heroin. (Yamamoto creatively allows the viewer to feel the drug experience by using impressive special effects, a feature that, along with striking cinematography, distinguishes the film.)
The scene turns kinky and violent as Miyuki ties up a male companion and suffocates and strangles him before frantically going in search of her next high. Other vignettes feature Hide, a tattoo artist, who befriends Myan, a Chinese American prostitute; Cawl, a Pakistani man who slits the throat of his girlfriend and kills a fellow Pakistani over money; Ryo and Sato, gang members whose plight includes the search for a supposedly abducted girlfriend and a gory fight: and, in one of the film’s most touching story lines, a Mexican wrestler named Mariana, who misses her children while she is wrestling in Japan.
In a bizarre twist, Yamamoto brings some of his characters together in a nightclub scene in which they play foosball, their separate experiences but common destructiveness bringing them together before they return to their individual lives of doom.
“Junk Food,” in Japanese with English subtitles, runs at the Roxie Cinema through September 24.