IFC #7: THE BOXER (1977)
(dir. Shūji Terayama, 1977, Japan, 360p)
So, how are you all doing out there? A combination of the US presidential election, second UK lockdown and a drastic temperature drop have made this week particularly grizzly for yours truly. That’s when comfort food, comfort music and comfort movies come in. Alas, I can’t write about watching Chungking Express (1994) for the millionth time — not when there are so many films to explore on YouTube.
At the expense of sounding like Your Dad, sports movies are a great source of comfort for me. It’s the familiarity in the narrative cliches, knowing that a story will click into place in all the ways you expect: the has-been turning into a champion. I’m always happy for subversion, but often in sports movies, I find myself appreciating how the stylistic differences don’t upend an otherwise smooth ride.
That’s how I found myself watching 1977’s The Boxer. I have hoped to write about Shūji Terayama at some point for Illicit Film Club, particularly his surrealist mid-length film Grass Labyrinth (1979). He was an artist who experimented in theatre, poetry, music, and novelist, the type of multi-hyphenate who was well aware of the cult that built around his artistic visions. When asked what his profession was, he would respond, cheekily: “I am a Terayama Shūji”. The Boxer ended up being my first entry into the late Terayama’s cinema and judging from my research, it’s easily the most straight-forward thing he ever made.
The Boxer is a film about a has-been turning into a champion. Straight up and down. Tenma (Kentarō Shimizu) is a young boxer who wants to be the champ, even after getting thoroughly battered in his first fight and advised to hang it up. Hayato (yakuza movie icon Bunta Sugawara) is the has-been’s trainer, a fighter who mysteriously gave up during a championship match and moved onto an alcohol-soused retirement. They have a tumultuous relationship, but they mostly find common ground through their love of the sport. There are several rousing training montages. All standard and ultimately satisfying. You sense Terayama being on his best behaviour, writing and directing for the legendary Toei Studios, contractually obliged to not improvise with the material. Adopted brother and close collaborator Henrikku Morisaki said that Toei “caused [Terayama] a lot of frustration” by doing so.
But bear in mind that while being an avant-garde figure, Terayama was also a celebrity at home: TV news covered his plays’ opening nights and his horseracing advert helped to increase the sport’s popularity. Watching The Boxer, you can tell that this popular figure was on a looser leash than Morisaki lets on — and in exchange for delivering all of the relevant plot points, Terayama can cut loose and follow more off-kilter impulses. For example, the inciting incident finds a man having his car dropped on him. At regular points, we turn to a zany comedy cafe that belongs in a totally different film, especially when a bunch of chickens break loose. (Like Rocky, y’know.)
Yet in the film’s most fascinating sequence, Terayama transforms the film into a melancholy documentary. Over archive footage of bouts and purple-tinted waves hitting the shore, Sugawara’s voiceover lists all the ways boxers died outside of the ring: murder-suicide, typhus in a POW camp, ran over by a train, ran over by a truck while sleeping. It’s almost as if this sport is cursed, as is anybody that dares to enter it. The film returns to semi-normal afterwards, but it leaves a sad churn in your stomach, uncertain over whether you want the young boxer to become a champ. Is this what it’s all about?
Terayama was fascinated by boxing, viewing it the same way he would see jazz and gambling: forms of expression that depended on being entirely present in the moment, bringing the practitioner to something like a zen state. Those are also fields where people crash out, violently and at great personal risk, and that fascinated him too. Despite his personal love of the sport — many real-life athletes, some of them close friends, appear in the film — the training montages find both Tenma and Hayato finding inspiration in hate. In any other movie, Tenma would break down and say he’s boxing to feel like someone; in this one, he falls to his knees and lists all the people he hates.
Placing hate as the driving force to become a great athlete is incredibly nihilistic. But it’s probably more honest than you’d expect from the boxing film, which usually finds redemption in violence. In another of the documentary-style sequences that Terayama implements, we watch a boxing free-for-all in a city square. “Burn your forgotten anger!” a boxing commentator at an outdoors event announces, looking to get men in the ring. In the final fight (which feels like few boxing matches in cinema history), Tenma’s rationale for fighting on is “I could kill him”. There’s no glory—only hatred. Shortly after, a dramatic freeze-frame closes the film, showing mentor and trainee in an embrace. We get a happy ending in the end. Well, it’s complicated. I guess I’m a sucker for comfort, but not too much comfort.
ELSEWHERE ON YOUTUBE:
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YG feat. Nipsey Hussle ‘FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)’
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