The City of Lost Souls

Miike continues to work at a furious pace: this gleeful destruction of a novel by Hase Seishu was one of four (or five?) features he shot in the last year.Mario (Brazilian-Japanese non-actor Teah) extricates Kei (Michelle Reis) from a busload of convicts in Mid-West America and sky-dives her into a bizarre vision of Tokyo. According to Miike, everything you’ve heard about the insularity and cohesion of Japanese life is wrong. This Tokyo is a mix of Latino street parties, ethnic community broadcasting and underground cock-fighting tournaments, the latter serving as a ‘front’ for a vast drug-smuggling enterprise run from subterranean caverns by faggy, aesthetic crimelords. Amidst all of this Mario and Kei try to get married, but find themselves on the run from warring gangs…The City of Lost Souls will probably never rank as a Miike classic, if only because it’s too indulgent towards its anti-hero’s macho pretensions. But like most of Miike’s genre movies it blends parody, cynicism and despair in a fast-lane rush of adrenalin; nobody else in world cinema – Hollywood’s ‘action specialists’ least of all – can match this level of nihilist romance. Highlights include the opening hommage to Italian westerns and a wonderfully unexpected sideswipe at The Matrix. (Tony Rayns)