Takashi Miike's The Way To Fight Review

The film opens in 90’s Osaka on the eve of a highly televised no holds barred fight between two local heros: the bantam weight boxing champion Kazuyoshi and the Japanese pro wrestling champion Takeshi. After a quick introduction the film jumps back twenty years to show us how these two ended up in the ring together.

We track two stories in parallel. On one hand there is Kazuyoshi, his loyal friend Toshio, and a girl – Ritsuko – in love with Kazuyoshi who Toshio is secretly pining for. Kazuyoshi is the ‘boss’ of his high school, the undisputed toughest kid going, happily willing to take on all comers and apparently peerless when it comes to fighting until the arrival of Takeshi at another school. Takeshi is one bad mofo in his own right, somewhat grimmer than the perpetually happy Kazuyoshi and evidently the only serious challenger to Kazuyoshi’s fighting supremacy. Rounding out Takeshi’s triangle of friends are his sister and the young owner of a local karate dojo who takes Takeshi and his raw aggression under his wing.

So … you now probably think you have a handle on the film. It’s a build to Kazuyoshi and Takeshi’s inevitable, climactic battle. Well, no. In the hands of a lesser director that’s what it would be but Miike isn’t particularly interested in going there. Oh, there are plenty of fights and a good amount of blood spilled but Kazuyoshi and Takeshi never actually clash on screen. The physical fights are absolutely not the point of what Miike is doing here and are not what the film’s title is pointing to. This is a film about fighting against your roots, a film about not giving up on life, a film about taking joy wherever you may find it. This is a film about fighting against circumstance, about fighting for friendship and dignity and fighting to forge your own identity.

Miike is often knocked for his shallow characters but there is plenty of depth here and the obvious core of the film is Miike’s love for all of his main characters. Kazuyoshi has an infectious zest for life – he has found his niche and he loves it – and lives alone with his batty old grandmother, one of the best, most heartfelt, characters to ever appear in a Miike film. Toshio is Kazuyoshi’s shy, quiet friend, coworker and right hand man. Obviously intelligent Toshio is nevertheless completely disinterested in school and both deeply ashamed of his mentally ill father and terrified that the illness may prove to be genetic. Ritsuko is a strong, eccentric girl raised by self loathing parents who want nothing more for their daughter than for her to escape their home town and put as much distance between herself and her origins as possible. Takeshi has the hardest lot of them all, living in a cold water apartment with his abusive, manual laborer father and only occasionally seeing his sister who lives elsewhere with his mother. Takeshi eventually forms a bond with the young – even younger than himself – owner of a local dojo who dropped out of school and fled his hometown to escape his own hated father.

Fans of Miike’s genre output will find much to like in the fight sequences but the best moments are the film’s quieter ones: Kazuyoshi and Toshio’s after school job in a grotty noodle shop, the surreal conversations with Kazuyoshi’s grandmother, Takeshi bringing drinks to the young students at the dojo, the comedy of errors as Takeshi and Kazuyoshi repeatedly miss each other in their first attempt to square off. The film is beautifully constructed and filled with detailed little touches and flashes of absurd humor that elevate it FAR beyond standard genre fare. That it is so well shot and constructed is purely a testament to Miike’s oft overlooked technical skills, especially when you consider that it was shot on a pocket change budget for KSS Films, one of the lowest of Japan’s low budget production houses. The Way To Fight is a quiet little gem, one of a handful of brilliant yet largely unknown Miike titles dug up in recent days. With acclaimed Miike titles like Shangri La and The Man In White still completely unavailable you can only guess at how many more hidden gems there are waiting to be excavated from the man’s lengthy filmography.

As for the DVD itself it is, sadly, a case of beggers can’t be choosers here. This is the first DVD release for the film outside of Japan – I’m not even convinced it’s received a Japanese DVD release yet – and Media Blasters didn’t have prime source material to work from. The transfer is adequate but not spectacular and is presented in matted widescreen format rather than anamorphic. You get the original Japanese soundtrack with optional English subtitles. Subtitles are excellent on all counts. On the feature front you get a solid interview piece with Takashi Miike discussing his background and launch into the film world. The 10+ minute piece doesn’t spill much factually that fans won’t already know but it does give an insightful look into the working of his mind. The DVD could be better but the strength of the film itself makes this pretty much required viewing. Highly recommended.