The New York Asian Film Festival ran from June 30 to July 16. For more information about what you missed, click here.
So the thing about youth is that they are, famously, all going down a bad path, all of the time.
Destruction Babies, as directed by Tetsuya Mariko, is the latest in that film genre that crosses all borders, the “What has happened to our children?” movie, where today’s youth are found to be nihilistic little monsters hastening the collapse of civilization itself.
The film opens on scenic shots of a port town, with a fuzzy, atonal guitar jam setting an inexplicable, almost contradictory sense of calm. Looking from the far side of the docks, young Shota (Nijiro Murakami) can only watch helplessly as his older brother Taira (Yuya Yagira, inscrutable and terrifying), intercepted on his way out of town, gets ambushed by thugs, eventually driving them off in a sloppy, uncoordinated free-for-all. By the time Shota makes it to the other side, his brother is gone, leaving him all alone in a dark and dangerous world.
It is an unrevealed amount of time before we see Taira again, but something is different; the camera trails Taira as he stalks the back alleys of an as yet unnamed city. He’s wearing the same outfit he was wearing when we first met him, caked with dirt and grime. We never see his face, but it’s clear something has changed, merely by the way he walks; his is a gait of shambling purposelessness. And when his face is revealed, the look on his face is that of someone looking for an opportunity to do something terrible.
He finds it.
A fight with a random musician reveals that whatever happened between when we saw him last an now, Taira has become the Terminator of getting the shit kicked out of him. He’s more animal than man, a silent beast that, once he’s got you in his sights, will not let you go: no matter how many times he is beaten bloody, he will simply keep coming. He will not stop until you’re just as broken, just as bloodied as he is.
He is the ultimate realization of the chorus to the song ‘Tubthumping’, and it is horrifying.
And yet, Taira isn’t the worst character on display. That honor belongs to the top-knotted wannabe thug Yuya, played by the deceptively clean faced Masaki Suda.
After standing there cowering while his friends are beaten to a pulp by Taira, Yuya encounters him during a later, different fight and decides that they should become a team. His confidence while in the presence of his unstoppable new buddy almost immediately curdles into something malignant and wrong, and as the night lingers on, Yuya feels increasingly comfortable letting out every sick impulse that’s ever crossed his twisted little mind.
Yes, Taira is a beast.
But Yuya proves to be a monster.
And… that’s the movie, really: Taira and Yuya cut an ever increasing path of chaos through the city of Matsuyama, while Shota does everything in his power to track down Taira, much to the annoyance of his asshole friend Kenji, who mostly cares about getting laid.
It makes its point early, portraying with clear eyed accuracy the sweaty underside of the night, and the remorseless camera captures everything with the crushing inescapability of an unending hangover as the duo roll from encounter to encounter, leaving a trail of pain and suffering in their wake. There is no release, no reprieve from the onslaught; the streets themselves seem to pulse with an undercurrent of senseless aggression and undirected fury. When the fists go flying, as they frequently and inevitably do, the soundtrack fills not with the foley of crunching celery, but with the actual sound of meaty fists pounding on soft, vulnerable flesh.
It’s a brutal, ugly sound, and therefore perfectly in tune with the movie itself.
Destruction Babies is nothing like a fun ride, though at times the sheer relentlessness of Taira becomes mordantly funny. It portrays a dank world, pretty much wholly devoid of happiness or anything like hope. So your mileage may vary as far as enjoyment goes, but you’ve got to respect the hell out of its commitment.
