Shuffle (1981) User Reviews

Pioneer of Punk!

[Coventry · 6/10 · 21 April 2007]

This extremely hectic and nearly headache-inducing short by the Japanese punk demigod Sogo Ishii is definitely one of the craziest and most experimental art-house movies I ever had the pleasure of seeing on a big screen (during a special revolving on the director). After the two hugely different but already influential long-feature films "Panic High School" and "Crazy Thunder Road", Ishii finally made the punk-short he clearly dreamed of making ever since the beginning. "Shuffle" is based on comic strip and doesn't really have a story to tell. The camera just very creatively follows a man as he's running out of his apartment and down the streets. He's running from the cops, because he murdered his girlfriend, but he's also running towards the pimp who stole her from him, for vengeance. 30 minutes of playtime only to depict a man running down some streets seems long, but Ishii somehow manages to make it fascinating by presenting a non-stop series of imaginative camera tricks, lighting techniques and unique sound-editing. The visuals are groundbreaking and far ahead of their time. The colors continuously fade out and back in, the camera is put in every possible perspective there is and the music is really loud and stimulating. "Shuffle" often looks like an exercise for Ishii's next big project "Burst City" and it definitely was a great source of influence for future Asian filmmakers like Takashi Miike and Shinya Tsukamoto. You can't really call it a great film, because there are almost no dialogs or character drawings, but it surely guarantees half a hour of adrenalin-rushing spectacle.

All style

[DanTheMan2150AD · 5/10 · 13 January 2024]

Gakuryu Ishii's Shuffle is mostly just a short exercise in style if nothing else. Often extremely hectic and practically headache-inducing, it lacks any form of narrative or characterisation, Shuffle instead concentrates on two intercutting and unfocused subplots that ultimately amount to very little. Adapted from the legendary Katsuhiro Otomo's short manga, Run, although Ishii never actually asked for permission until after the film had been shot, go figure. Granted, the exhaustingly long chase through the Japanese streets which make up the majority of the film is shot in wild, semi-abstract patterns so that you're never quite sure what you're seeing and backed by a repetitive if memorable industrial synth score. You can certainly feel the influence Ishii's punk stylings would have on more modern Japanese cinema but I just wish there was a bit more meat on Shuffle's bones to make me fall in love with its underground grim.