After a car crash that leads to the death of his girlfriend, a young medical student must regain the memories he's lost of her while dissecting her body in anatomy class, watched over by the careful scorn of a new love interest, the original girlfriend's father and dying mother, his own concerned parents, and the class's professor and students. With love scenes involving mutual erotic asphyxiation, dance and theatre added to a stylistic cinematic structure, and flash-backs, dream sequences, and flash forwards all given equivalent value with the same structural equivalent, Shinya Tsukamoto explores a rather direct territory of Eros and Thanatos while wrestling with history, memory, subconscious, and loss. Thematic quote du jour: "How can I compete with the perfect happiness of false memories?"
An interesting contextual aside, Tsukamoto's famous Tetsuo: The Iron Man also revolves, plot-wise, around a half-remembered car accident and the ripple-effect of relationships and memories it destroys. I haven't done enough research into Tsukamoto's life myself to know if there was a particularly horrific car accident he was involved in, but the usage is in fitting with his general themes between organism and technology, reflected in Tetsuo as a man slowly turning into a scrapheap and in Vital as a robot from the future experiencing an electrical surge of mankind's memories before being destroyed on the planet Mars, or the contrasting book-ending images in the movie itself of smokestacks at the beginning and rain and nature at the end.
As a final note for recommendation's sake, this movie is 85 minutes long and feels like 15.
An interesting contextual aside, Tsukamoto's famous Tetsuo: The Iron Man also revolves, plot-wise, around a half-remembered car accident and the ripple-effect of relationships and memories it destroys. I haven't done enough research into Tsukamoto's life myself to know if there was a particularly horrific car accident he was involved in, but the usage is in fitting with his general themes between organism and technology, reflected in Tetsuo as a man slowly turning into a scrapheap and in Vital as a robot from the future experiencing an electrical surge of mankind's memories before being destroyed on the planet Mars, or the contrasting book-ending images in the movie itself of smokestacks at the beginning and rain and nature at the end.
As a final note for recommendation's sake, this movie is 85 minutes long and feels like 15.