The opening montage to Shojin Fukui’s 964 Pinocchio, consisting as it does of rapid cross-cutting between a sterile hospital corridor, a badly-lit lobotomy, and a lesbian sex romp, is perfectly conducive to setting the tone of what is a suitably bizarre film. Like a hyperactive kid fed a vat of speed, this introduction establishes the sense of relentless acceleration that exemplifies the visual tempo maintained throughout the film, a little known Japanese gem from 1991.
Released from the hospital suffering from untreatable amnesia, Himiko takes it upon herself to map the streets to alleviate the need for a functioning memory. It is whilst perched by a lamppost, scrutinising the full geometric scope of her endeavour, that she runs into the mysterious Pinocchio, a young man, seemingly mute and bald save for an erect tuft of hair protruding from the summit of his skull. Seeing his childlike helplessness, she takes him home and plays mama, teaching him his name (syllable by syllable), taking him shopping, disciplining him via a brisk slap to the temple – all good parental duties ticked off. Meanwhile, all of this is inter-cut with a host of sordid sex goings-on and the cryptic actions of some ne’er-do-wells. We can only assume that the two are somehow connected.
Following an alarming incident back home involving Pinocchio, a bucket-load of yellow pus and some disjointed editing, Himiko ends up running around the city, vomiting repeatedly and screaming perpetually. As Pinocchio lapses into mad spasms featuring oodles of multicoloured gunk flowing forth from his face, and Himiko becomes progressively more and more deranged, the narrative descends into utter lightning-paced insanity.
Fukui is clearly indebted to Tetsuo: The Iron Man – that classic of cinematic cyberpunk surreality. Preserving an aesthetic of fast cuts, hand-held cameras, and grainy images, he overloads 964 Pinocchio with all the traits we’ve come to associate with Tsukamoto’s early genius (along with subsequent examples of the subgenre like, for instance, the delightful Electric Dragon 80,000V). Prolonged excursions of sprinting across the cityscape are particularly receptive for alignment with the aforementioned influence – Himiko’s spew-scream jog is an extended exercise in spiraling dementia that occupies the screen for an age, and later on we get Pinocchio doing his own dash, dragging a triangular cinderblock past gawking on-lookers. The sort of frenzied close-ups that preceded Aronofsky by years also get a strong workout here.
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