Peep “TV” Show

Raw, authentic and ostentatiously low budget, with low-grade images, this DV feature dissolves the borders that supposedly separate fiction from reality. Centred on the generation of kids that hang out on the streets and small apartments around Shibuya, in Tokyo, Yutaka Tsuchiya’s film captures two months of the strangely dislocated lives of these young people. No family life is hinted at, they often live alone and isolated in cubicle like apartments. Obsessed by the internet, by surveillance cameras, at home with internet porn, always dealing with sex but at the same time strangely sexless, but caught up in numerous forms of peeping in which they peep and in turn become somebody else’s spectacle, this is a generation for which fashion statements are not just a way of life, but their very being and identity. Yutaka scripted Peep “TV” Show in collaboration with a ‘goth’ girl, her street style half way between vampire and shepherd girl Bo Peep. The film radiates authenticity as it follows several diverse characters through their night and day life in the electronically wired, digital neon city of surfaces and screens. If it is a film more of encounters and an accumulation of incidents than a concluding narrative, it is the better to describe and offer a real vision of this extraordinary society of the spectacle in this urban, young people’s world. [S.F.]