LONDON ¨C One of the most powerful and violent films to be shown at the Venice Film Festival this year, Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto¡¯s ¡°Nobi¡± (¡°Fires on the Plain¡°), delivers a stinging anti-war message bathed in blood.
A remake of a 1959 classic, the film, shown late on Monday and in competition for the main festival prize, sticks to the plot of Kon Ichikawa¡¯s earlier film about defeated Japanese troops in the Philippines in World War II.
The version by Tsukamoto, whose past horror-and-fantasy-tinged films have earned him a reputation as an auteur of the strange, pumps up the volume in terms of severed body parts, bloody stumps of arms, maggot-ridden corpses and starving soldiers descending into cannibalism.
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