School girl bye bye
Akihiko Shiota releases a Harmful Insect.

By Johnny Ray Huston

SIX POP BOTTLES filled with fire. These objects appear deep within the compact labyrinth of Akihiko Shiota's new film, Harmful Insect. The bottles belong to 13-year-old Sachiko (Eureka's Aoi Miyazaki), who has journeyed through an intrusive, assaultive urban maze to reach them. But Sachiko is about to share her possessions with the world around her. When she does, the resulting images have silent-film ferocity, even if they're accompanied by a swelling roar.

Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, and Shiota's newest cinematic blast prove that the United States isn't the current (or at least recent) teen film kingdom. Excepting the parental phoniness of Shunji Iwai's Larry Clarkophilic All about Lily Chou-Chou – which refashions Bully's tabloid pose-athon into a conservative epic – Japan's latest international exports bear little relation to Hollywood's youth-clone machine. The closest American cousin to Harmful Insect might be Dennis Hopper's 1980 Out of the Blue. Both movies follow a solitary female in her early teens through hostile terrain, both sharpen the edges of rock music to draw blood, and both fuse dramatic compounds to create a climactic explosion.

A Neil Young poison valentine sung to a not-forgotten Johnny Rotten accompanies Linda Manz's punk rocker as she traipses through a dump in Out of the Blue; the martyrdom myth in Young's lyric is a call Manz can't resist answering. The difference between Hopper's movie and Shiota's is the difference between wizened sentimentalism and wise sympathy. For an hour, Harmful Insect navigates the trapped tension of Sachiko's existence with a mostly music-free rigor that respects and emphasizes the dormant violence within her silence. The dead air of an apartment she shares with her suicidal single mother (an echo of Shiota's Don't Look Back). The suffocating atmosphere of a school where she's gossiped about by kids who think they know her. The unease of streets where men tail her in hopes of buying sex.

Once, twice, three times Sachiko's look-alike friend Natsuko (Yuu Aoi, bangs slightly more straight than Miyazaki's) descends the square-tiled stairs outside her home to join a trio of uniformed girls, in a superb sequence that nails the repetition of school "life" with brisk precision. Initially, Sachiko escapes these surroundings via tactile fantasy; pretending to be blind, she touches the spines of library books, trying to find something on the surface of an encyclopedic collection. But a true escape route appears one twilight, when a red laser light appears on the chest of the latest business-suited enjo kosai pest stalking her.

One might say an expert shot leads Sachiko to another city on the fringes of the city she knows and hates.

At least this zone of volcanic rocks, metal shacks, and paralyzed skeletal buildings has a horizon. In Cure and Pulse, Kurosawa conjures societal and spiritual dread from similar spaces, but Shiota – who worked as an assistant director on Kurosawa's Kandagawa Wars and The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl – favors a direct mode of visual attack. Kurosawa releases ghosts from smudges on the walls of abandoned rooms; Shiota demonstrates that trash is the material of creative destroyers. Here, amid rubble, after faked accidents and fateful murder, he ignites a score by Number Girl. The group, who have recorded albums such as School Girl Distortional Addict and songs such as "Young Girl Seventeen Sexually Knowing," may as well have been formed for Sachiko. Or she was made for them. Without singing a word, they race and crash and burn for her.

Harmful Insect may not massacre 42 students, but a case could be made that its relatively bloodless vision is more effectively brutal than Battle Royale's. The movie's vicious force – stronger than but similar to that of Kurosawa's Seance – primarily takes the form of compressed wind and flame; fierce gusts of air seem to propel Sachiko along her scorched-earth trajectory. Adding his name to a long list of directors ranging from Kitano to Carax, Shiota recognizes film as a form of fireworks. The army of boys in his Don't Look Back shoot tiny rockets into an oblivious sky. Harmful Insect is like those six pop bottles contained within it. Inventive and deadly.

'Harmful Insect' screens as part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival Fri/8, AMC Kabuki 8, S.F. See First Runs, in Film listings, for times. For an interview with Akihiko Shiota go to www.sfbg.com/36/23/shiota.html

San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

The 20th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival takes place March 7-17.

Venues are:

AMC Kabuki 8, 1881 Post, S.F.

Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, S.F.

Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F.

Justice League, 628 Divisadero, S.F.

Locus 1640 Post, 1640 Post, S.F.

New PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

Camera 3 Cinemas, Second Street and San Carlos, San Jose

and Agenda Cellar, 399 S. First St., San Jose.

For tickets call (415) 478-2277 or go to www.naatanet.org/festival.