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Eugene Kotlyarenko has built a career on drawing upon his widely-viewed cinephilic base of knowledge to consider more contemporary forms of hyper-online, of-the-moment provocation, and “Vintage Violence” is no exception.
As with Kotlyarenko’s arguably best-known film, 2020’s “Spree,” live-streaming is key: “Vintage Violence” introduces obnoxious social media celebrity Carter (Cole Sprouse) mid-stream before quickly spinning out into a gangsters-vs-everybody-and-each-other free-for-all. Zipping around Tokyo, Kotlyarenko underlines the of-the-moment-ness of his scenario at every turn, but the film is a surprisingly slow ride despite the overload.
Per his press kit bio, Kotlyarenko specializes in films “exploring love and cultural madness in the age of social media,” of which “Vintage Violence” is definitely one. Carter’s jam-packed introduction finds him in vertical vision while chat-box commenters provide both random insults and background information about the character at a speed almost impossible to process; more relevant details are being dispensed than can possibly be fully absorbed.
The impressive density of this overload, which embraces the possibilities of relatively new technology to find novel ways to deliver and compress context, diminishes as Carter is drawn to Japan by Izumi Adachi (Kiko Mizuhara). She lures him with promises of fabulously large sums to be made by selling the vintage denim he found mid-stream — i.e., a duffel-bag-sized Macguffin that can set the protagonists in perpetual motion. (The denim was also apparently integral to the making of the production: per the end credits, “This film was made with the generous support of Levi’s and Levi’s Japan.”)
There is no meaningful trace of the past beyond fetishizable commodities in Kotlyarenko’s film, only the relentless present; shooting with his characteristically tilt-and-zoom-heavy fluidity, cinematographer Sean Price Williams amplifies that twitchy energy.
Appropriated from a John Cale album, the title accurately describes scenes of bloodletting committed by bizarre, scenery-chewing yakuza members, and the energy hovers somewhere around a bloodier-than-baseline Takashi Miike movie from the mid-2000s. But, per his conceptual preference, Kotlyarenko’s riff on familiar territory is texturally very now, and the setpieces are often based around tech that didn’t exist 20 years ago. The best of these is a chase where Carter’s phone is stolen and he chases down the thief, gauging his proximity by how much his bluetooth earbuds start crackling; the closer he gets, the more unbroken the sound.
Kotlyarenko is cinematically omnivorous: Beyond the copious Japanese filmmakers he references, “Vintage Violence” riffs on everything from “North by Northwest” to “Wanderlust.” As the plot progresses, increasingly outré elements are introduced: a hotel that seems to have been founded by the same TV programming team that made content in Olivier Assayas’s “demonlover,” or a gangster whose severed finger has been replaced by a spray bottle of poisonous mist. This kind of non-stop maximalism in the service of cult-movie scenes that scream “clip me and put me online!” can quickly grow old, and while “Vintage Violence” is admirably committed to living up to the mayhem of its forebears, like many of them the cumulative effect is more enervating than energizing.
The film internalizes potential objections about a foreign director making a film that claims insight into Japanese characters’ interiority, with Carter being ritualistically insulted as a gaijin, or outsider. Sprouse is a serviceable lead, adapting to new forms of mayhem while slowly reaching a form of moral rehabilitation, for which he’s rewarded with a romantic arc. For all its determination to be firmly of the Now and provide midnight-movie crassness, “Vintage Violence’s” constituent parts can be surprisingly stock.
