Cut
Amir Naderi | Japan | 2011
132 min
Lamenting the death of cinema as an art form is the daring and fascinating film Cut from Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi. A plea by its director using the story and its protagonist, it conveys the agony and frustration of finding peace in the never ending debate about cinema as art or entertainment.
Naderi’s film centers on Shuji, a struggling filmmaker who runs special screenings at his rundown apartment terrace for film enthusiasts where he preaches about the necessity of films from the past while decrying the prevalence of commercial cinema and multiplexes today. He is summoned by a mob boss to be told that his brother, a debt collector for them, has been killed for his betrayal, leaving Shuji with a huge debt to pay off. Feeling responsible for this death, having learned that the loans his brother took were to fund his three failed films, Shuji is tasked to return all the money his brother owed in two weeks or face similar consequences. Without any finances of his own he offers himself as a human punching bag to the mob crew assembled at the rundown gym that they own. Bizarre as it may sound, his plan works, to brutal affect, and he soon starts collecting money with the aim of building towards the amount owed by sacrificing himself physically. Blow by blow, his body starts to crumble under the strain of endless punches, but his will, fuelled by his zealous passion for the cinema of the past, edges him on.
Director Naderi is sure that what we know as cinema today is dying and very few filmmakers exist who can be considered true artists. His case is made by Shuji, who returns after each days pounding and renews his desire to continue with his arduous task by surrounding himself with images of his favourite films projected on white sheets on which he lies on recovering and reminiscing about each of the 80 screenings he’s had so far. This results in some surreal imagery and true film aficionados will relish the juxtaposing of pivotal scenes from classics, both Hollywood and Japanese into the narrative. Though the film becomes pretentious and downright indulgent at times – scenes of Shuji shouting about the death of cinema from his terrace and visiting the graves of Kurosawa and Ozu being the prime culprits – the film picks up tremendously in the spellbinding final moments when, faced with the possibility of his own death and not being able to continue any longer, Shuji challenges to take a hundred punches as he counts down his hundred favourite films (complete with screen title cards showing the year of release and director).
Conveying the death of his cherished art in the form of human suffering and sacrifice is probably the director’s way of setting an example and he is onto something. Repetitious as some of the brutal scenes in the gym are they add up mesmerizingly well. While it may have been easier to give the protagonist a simpler ideal to hold onto, defend and motivate him (such as a wife or child who compel him to continue) it would have also been more conventional and this fight against convention is what makes Cut rise above the mediocrity present in cinema today.
