The Red Spectacles

Mamoru Oshii's 1987 The Red Spectacles is nearly impossible to describe. Utilizing the conventions of film noir and samurai films and shot with the precise, often distorted framing of a graphic novel, The Red Spectacles is a logical live-action extension of the director's animated classics Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor. In a not-so-distant, over-regulated dystopic future, the authority of a ruling elite police force is challenged by a band of internal rogues, led by Koichi (Shigeru Chiba). After disappearing for several years, Koichi returns to discover that his city is worse than he remembered and that both his former friends and enemies are trying to kill him. The specter of Godard's Alphaville looms over The Red Spectacles, a film in which the future is characterized not by technological advances, but by a Luddite fear of human innovation and creativity, a theme semi-articulated even in the filming itself, which shifts from vibrant color in the early scenes to sepia tones. Amidst the self-conscious formalism, though, is a wacky, surrealistic sense of humor, nicely channeled by Chiba, who plays the kind of taciturn but deadly hero embodied in earlier generations by Alain Delon, Clint Eastwood, or Toshiro Mifune, but adds a silent comic's agility. Recommended. [Note: also newly available are Oshii's 1991 Stray Dog and 1992 Talking Head.] (D. Fienberg)