Tokyo Fist (1995) is the rare boxing movie where the thrills aren’t so much found in matches but in the way the sport, depending on whether one of its male leads is winning or losing, gives a catharsis to the multi-sourced rage they bottle up or makes corporeal the emotional pain they otherwise conceal.
Those male leads are Tsuda and Kojima (real-life brothers Shinya Tsukamoto and Kōji Tsukamoto), one-time high-school friends forever bound by a shared trauma who reenter each other’s lives soon after the film opens. Tsuda is working as a salesman; his frustration from his insurance-salesman job’s monotony is exacerbated by his having to financially support his fiancée, Hizuru (Kahori Fujii). Kojima works with decent success as a professional boxer.
Progressing at a rapid, dislocating clip, the movie at first seems primed to be a toxic love-triangle movie when Hizuru, vaguely a menace with unclear intentions, starts making moves on Hizuru, who is receptive to a kiss when they have a moment alone together but nothing more — at least at first. Hizuru, though, is never relegated to a weak pawn. She becomes more assertive the more borderline-abusively Tsuda — who soon takes up boxing, too — treats her. She’ll eventually become the dominant figure among the trio, leaving Tsuda and Kojima to reexamine the dark history their relationship is raveled in and just how much their conceptions of who they should be are indivisible from the noxious masculinity they’d been raised to think of as a blueprint to aspire to.
Even though I dug the unruliness of these actors’ performances, I found their characters much less interesting than Hizuru, who uncovers the kind of power and self-confidence she’s never really embodied with a twinned reality of being a wanted woman and a woman who realizes she doesn’t have to filter her wants in life through the gaze of the men in her life. Tokyo Fist moves by so quickly — made additionally woozy by the tendency from director Shinya Tsukamoto, who also acted as cinematographer, to overwash scenes in nauseous blue and in general keep the camera itself anxiously moving around — that you may naturally wish it would slow down to take a breath, to really settle into an emotion. But with a trio of characters either rapidly descending into nervous breakdowns or ascending into new strata of their power, it’s maybe just right that the movie so spasmodically evokes that old saying that life comes at you fast.
Peterson Reviews 