Winning the Battle, Losing the War

Law and order have broken down. The nation’s youth is running amok, unchecked and uncontrollable. In response to the perceived escalating public order crisis the Government has passed the Millennium Education Reform Act.

The “Battle Royale Act”, as it is now better known, dictates that, as a deterrent to wayward youth, each year a junior high school class should be selected at random, spirited away to a secluded island and its members forced to hunt and kill each other until only one student is left. This year, the 42 students of Shiroiwa Junior High School’s Class 3B are the unlucky contestants.

The above isn’t an excerpt from a New Labour press release but the premise of Kinji Fukasaku’s ultra-violent Japanese satire Battle Royale. The film was released in UK cinemas in the same week as the attack on the World Trade Centre. Having watched a lifetime’s worth of horror played out live on their televisions that week it was understandable that people didn’t rush out to witness more murder and mayhem at the multiplexes.

The film caused a sensation in Japan, breaking box office records and drawing criticism from the then education minister, Nobutaka Machimura, who called for curbs on cinematic violence. While it garnered considerable critical plaudits in the UK – no review was complete without a Lord of the Flies reference – these didn’t translate into big takings over here. It went on to gain a strong, but less than mainstream, following when released on DVD and a sequel was released last year.

The film, set in a dystopian near-future Japan, sees each student given a map, water and a weapon (ranging, perversely, from crossbows and Uzis to saucepan lids). They are also fitted with electronic collars around their necks which will explode, killing those still alive, if no victor has emerged after three days. Quadrants of the island periodically become “danger zones” which will also cause the collars to explode should a contestant dawdle or attempt to sit out the fight by hiding in one location.

So, still in their school uniforms, they fight. Refusal to play the game is no defence. Alliances falter under the crushing paranoid certainty that only one (or else none) can survive. Trivial schoolyard grudges are settled in the most terrible ways. In the grinding tension, friend turns on friend. At any moment death, in the shape of an erstwhile school chum, may leap from the undergrowth.

Some Western fans of the movie, not aware of director Fukasaku’s previous work thought a precocious new Young Turk in the vein of Tarantino had arrived. There was some surprise, therefore, when it emerged he was a 71 year-old veteran of more than 60 movies including the 1970 Pearl Harbour epic Tora! Tora! Tora! (Tarantino dedicated Kill Bill Vol. 1 to Fukasaku and, ever the cinematic magpie, paid a further tribute by casting Battle Royale’s terrifying killer schoolgirl, Chiaki Kuriyama, as another terrifying killer schoolgirl, Go Go Yubari.)

In an interview with the Guardian in 2001 Fukasaku told how his experience of working in a weapons factory targeted by Allied bombing during the Second World War permeated the film.

“During the raids, even though we were friends working together, the only thing we would be thinking of was self-preservation. We would try to get behind each other or beneath dead bodies to avoid the bombs,” he said. “When the raid was over, we didn’t really blame each other, but it made me understand about the limits of friendship.”

As those remarks might suggest, and for such a violent movie, Battle Royale is painted in places with some satisfying light and shade. The film features many quieter, poignant moments: case in point is the class teacher who oversees his pupils destruction – played with a disturbing unpredictability by the Japanese comedian and light entertainer-turned-filmmaker Takeshi Kitano.

(Kitano is a fascinating character, a true Renaissance man and cultural icon in his native Japan. A comparison would be to imagine Noel Edmonds writing, directing and starring in elegiac but stupendously violent gangster movies after calling time on his House Party. Aside from his films, Kitano still manages to find time to be an acclaimed painter, write a newspaper sports column and remain a mainstay of Japanese prime time television.)

In the film, the teacher, who in a blurring of fiction and reality is also called Kitano, swings between unspeakable acts of violence and terrifying acts of kindness towards his teenage charges – particularly Noriko, a student who Kitano, it is suggested, sees as a surrogate for his own, estranged daughter.

These kindly acts have the audience holding its breath because they are so unexpected after his earlier malice, making one anxious that they may be a precursor to further atrocity. And all committed with amused insouciance blended with almost endearing hangdog disappointment.

Equally unsettling are the back stories of some of the students, told in tender, sometimes melancholy, thumbnail sketches of unrequited crushes and petty squabbles. These give the audience just enough time to get to know and begin rooting for the hapless protagonists before the inevitable catches up with them.

The film’s satirical stripe has crossed the cultural divide, found relevance in the West and, five years from its release, still maintains a cultural resonance. It shows how popular culture is often co-opted by authority for its own ends (memorably, the students have the rules of the game explained them by video starring an MTV-style VJ) and used as a distraction.

We live in an age where people are spurred into ever-increasingly bizarre and extreme acts on reality TV shows. Only a few years ago we were encouraged by Clive James to laugh at such spectacles as Japan’s Endurance. Now, having watched troops of our minor celebrities queue up to eat live insects on UK television, the British public would hardly raise a smile.

Battle Royale also depicts a society seeking to subjugate or destroy that which it fears and cannot control, namely youth. In 21st Century Britain, civil liberties are, to many people’s minds, under threat and unruly children are demonised, criminalised and incarcerated like never before. You could almost imagine a Channel 4 commissioning editor or some policy wonk at the increasingly desperate Tory Party thinking it would be a great idea for Britain to have its own Battle Royale programme.

Sadly, Fukasaku succumbed to bone cancer during filming of the sequel – subtitled Requiem – and his son, Kenta, who also wrote the screenplays for both films, picked up the directorial reins.

The rules of the game have been tweaked in the new movie. The contestants now fight in pairs and should one be killed his partner’s fate is also sealed by his exploding collar. The members of the class now also have a mission above and beyond personal survival – they must hunt and kill a wanted terrorist (whose identity is a major spoiler of the first movie) and his cohorts who are wreaking death and destruction across Japan.

The first movie was sourced from Koushun Takami’s bestselling novel but he had no involvement in the sequel. Battle Royal II failed to gain the critical and cult following of its predecessor. While Japanese box office was good, British word of mouth was been mixed with some critics feeling that the sequel replaces the satirical edge of the original with some fairly clumsy anti-American moralising.

The sequel certainly lacks the post-September 11 sensibility that has infused many recent Hollywood movies (and which is already becoming something of a cinematic cliché and straightjacket).

Its opening scene features a cityscape of skyscrapers thundering to the ground after a terrorist attack. Amazingly, this scene in particular and the film in general failed to spark outrage from any quarter (the lack of a cinematic release in the US may have had much to do with that). The Battle Royale franchise had laid down its crossbow and picked up a sledgehammer.