Survive Style 5+: The Japanese Ad-Man's Candy-Coloured Chaos

A man buries his wife in a forest. He drives home. She is sitting in the house, waiting for him, in an extremely bad mood. He kills her again. He buries her again. She comes back again.

That is one of the five stories in Survive Style 5+, and it is the least eccentric of them.

Gen Sekiguchi’s 2004 film came out of the Japanese advertising industry — Sekiguchi and screenwriter Taku Tada both worked in commercials — and it looks like it in every frame, which turns out to be the highest compliment available. This is a film in which no wall is a normal colour, no room is lit the way rooms are lit, and no shot lasts longer than it needs to. It flopped, travelled the festival circuit, and settled into a durable cult afterlife as the thing people put on to show other people what colour can do.

This is a revisit; the strands and how they meet stay below the line. Above it, the case for a film that is usually dismissed as a showreel.

The five strands

Tadanobu Asano is the husband who cannot keep his wife (Reika Hashimoto) in the ground. Asano was, at this point, the most interesting actor in Japanese genre cinema, and he plays the whole thing with the exhaustion of a man dealing with a recurring plumbing problem.

Vinnie Jones is a British hitman, flown in for a contract, who spends the film demanding — through an interpreter played by Yoshiyoshi Arakawa — that everyone he meets tell him what their function in life is. It is the best use anyone has ever made of Vinnie Jones, and I do not say that lightly. The joke works because Jones plays it with complete gravity, as though the question were reasonable and the answers genuinely mattered to him.

Kyoko Koizumi is an advertising executive who conceives the film’s fake commercials, which are threaded through the picture as inserts and which are, without exception, magnificent. Ittoku Kishibe is a father who has been hypnotised on a stage show into believing he is a bird, and who does not come out of it, with consequences his family have to absorb over breakfast. Hiroshi Abe is the hypnotist. There are burglars. There are more strands than the title’s five, arguably, and Sekiguchi keeps them all moving.

Yoko Kanno wrote the score. If you know Kanno’s work from anime, you know what she can do with tonal range; here she is asked to hold five incompatible films together with music, and she does it.

Why the ad-world craft is the substance

The standard dismissal of this film is that it is a showreel — two hours of commercial technique with no soul underneath. That critique is worth taking seriously and then rejecting, because the technique is doing structural work.

Consider the colour, which is the first thing anyone notices. Every interior in Survive Style 5+ is aggressively, unnaturally designed: patterned wallpaper, saturated furniture, palettes that no human would choose to live inside. Advertising’s core skill is making a space communicate a feeling in three seconds flat, and Sekiguchi applies that skill to characterisation. You learn who these people are from their wallpaper before they speak. In a film juggling five stories with no time to establish anyone, the wallpaper is load-bearing exposition, and it is the main reason the picture stays comprehensible at all.

The same goes for the cutting. Commercial editing is built on the fastest possible arrival at a payload — no throat-clearing, no establishing, straight in. Sekiguchi runs the entire film that way. Scenes start in the middle. Setups are dispatched in a shot. A conventional ensemble film would spend forty minutes introducing five worlds; this one is fully operational inside ten, and that speed is what buys it room for five stories instead of two.

Then there is the framing, which is the most disciplined thing here. Sekiguchi shoots almost everything symmetrically, centred, at a fixed height, with the camera square to the back wall — the grammar of a product shot. It has an odd effect on the performances. Placed dead centre in a violently patterned room, an actor becomes an object on display, presented for consideration in the same way a commercial presents a watch. The film’s people are merchandise in their own homes, and Sekiguchi arrives at that idea through lens placement rather than dialogue, which is the sort of thing you can only do if you have spent a decade selling watches.

And the fake commercials are the film’s thesis stated out loud. Koizumi’s character invents adverts that are surreal, arresting, and utterly hollow — objects of pure craft with nothing inside. Sekiguchi cuts them into a film that is itself surreal, arresting and made of pure craft, which is either an act of self-indictment or a very good joke about where he works. Either reading holds, and the film is more interesting for refusing to settle it.

The one genuinely tender mechanism is the bird father. Kishibe plays a man who has lost his mind in a stupid way, and his family’s response is to adapt around him — building him a perch, feeding him, adjusting their lives to accommodate an absurdity they cannot fix. Sekiguchi shoots this material in the same candy-coloured register as everything else, and it is quietly heartbreaking anyway. That is the film’s proof of life.

The collector’s ancestor

The reflexive comparison is Tarantino, on the grounds that any multi-strand crime picture from 1995 onward gets that comparison automatically. It is worthless here. Sekiguchi has no interest in dialogue, no interest in cool, and no interest in the crime plot as an organising principle.

The real ancestor is Seijun Suzuki. Suzuki’s pop-art yakuza delirium in Tokyo Drifter is the film Sekiguchi is actually descended from, and the debt is precise: a genre framework treated as a pretext for colour, sets built as graphic statements rather than places, a plot the director is visibly bored by, and a conviction that the image is the reason anyone came. Nikkatsu fired Suzuki for making films like that. Forty years later, Japanese advertising was paying people to.

There is a second ancestor, and it is the studio fever dream. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Meyer and Ebert’s assault on the studio ensemble, runs the identical structure — multiple strands, cartoon colour, tonal violence, a plot that exists to be interrupted — and shares the sensibility of makers who have decided that coherence is somebody else’s problem.

The nearest sibling, though, is contemporaneous and Japanese: the sketch-comedy fever dream Funky Forest, released a year later, from the same milieu, with Asano again, doing the shapeless version of the same idea. Watch them together and the difference is instructive — Sekiguchi’s film is disciplined chaos with a structure underneath, and the other is chaos that has abolished the structure entirely. For the wider register of Japanese absurdism at feature length, Matsumoto’s white-room puzzle is the rigorous end of the same spectrum.

The case against

The film has no engine. Five strands proceed in parallel, converge because the running time requires it, and the convergence is mechanical rather than meaningful. Nothing that happens in strand three affects strand one in a way that changes anything, and once you notice that, the second hour starts to feel like a queue.

The character work outside Kishibe and Jones is thin. Asano is doing a single joke very well for two hours. The advertising executive is a device. And the burglars, who exist to generate connective tissue, are the film’s dead weight.

The title’s plus sign is an accurate warning: this is a film with more ideas than it can pay off, and a good number are abandoned mid-thought. Some viewers will find the accumulation exhilarating. Others will find it undisciplined, and both are describing the same object accurately.

The verdict

Survive Style 5+ is one of the best-looking films of its decade and it does not remotely care whether you think that is enough. Twenty years on, its colour, its cutting and its willingness to be silly at a very high technical standard have aged far better than most of what the Japanese industry took seriously in 2004. Vinnie Jones asking a nation what its function is remains a genuinely great comic conceit, and Kanno’s score is doing more heavy lifting than anyone credits.

It is also, quietly, a film about advertising made by people who understood the industry from the inside and were honest enough to depict its products as beautiful and empty. That self-awareness is the thing that lifts it above the showreel charge.

Watch it in company, watch it loud, and watch the wallpaper. It has been reliably available on disc for years and drifts on and off streaming; either way, the transfer matters more than usual here, because this is a film that is almost entirely colour.

Spoilers below

The strands do converge, and the mechanism is the hitman. Vinnie Jones’s contract is what threads the picture together — the target’s identity is the hinge that connects the advertising executive’s world to the husband’s, and the collision, when it arrives, is staged as farce rather than as revelation.

The wife’s returns turn out to be the film’s most durable idea. Sekiguchi never explains them. She simply keeps coming back, angrier each time, and the husband’s problem escalates from an inconvenience to an existential condition — he has murdered his marriage and the marriage will not accept it. The resolution has him stop trying, which is the closest the film comes to a moral.

The bird father is the strand that pays off best. His family’s accommodation of his condition curdles into genuine crisis, and Sekiguchi finds a resolution for it that is both ludicrous and completely sincere. It lands harder than anything in the crime material, and it is why the film survives rewatching.

And Jones’s question gets answered. The film’s final move is to hand every character a function, more or less literally, and to suggest that the hitman’s absurd interrogation was the only serious enquiry anybody in the picture was conducting. That is a decent trick for a film about wallpaper.