Royal Battles
An interesting matrix of diverse influences, coupled with a palpable boredom with most American culture, has culminated for a group of tenacious geeks in a mania for Asian media, and certain Japanese genre pieces in particular. I don't know where or when it all started, but it goes something like this: the importing of Japanese animated features resulted in the rediscovery of manga, which in turn brought on an interest in Japanese film in general, an fascination that expanded at two ends of cinema history at the same time. New films such as RINGU and BATTLE ROYALE and the films of Takashi Miike captivated filmgoers who at the same time revived older B films by Suzuki and Fukasaku. Meanwhile, on the Chinese side of things, the sudden appearance of Hong Kong action directors such as John Woo and Tsui Hark back in the early '90s showed that Asian films could out-does Spielberg in frenetic comedy action with over the top stunts and brisk editing. This obsession with all media Asian culminates in Tarantino's paean to the Oriental aesthetic in KILL BILL and Sofia Coppola's culture clash tale LOST IN TRANSLATION.
The people over at HVE (Home Vision Entertainment), in collaboration with the American Cinematheque, have capitalized on this interest in all cinemas Asian to the benefit of Americans without Region 3 DVD players. That's great, but ultimately, I'm not exactly sure how things work over there at HVE. Officially, Home Vision Entertainment is partners with, markets, and distributes The Criterion Collection, and both jointly own the titles in the fabled old 16mm catalog of art films from the '40s, '50s, and early '60s, Janus Films: The Classic Collection, which many of us remember from high school film classes. Together the duo distribute about 50 DVDs a year. But what defines an HVE film versus a Criterion title? The subject of what Criterion releases fascinates film fans everywhere, from MastersofCinema.com to various Criterion fan sites, which spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the company will release next. It's like Kremlinology. According to Home Vision Entertainment, HVE is a mix of genre-driven cult films and contemporary movies. Criterion, meanwhile, has been the vehicle through which the old Janus films are made available on disc (though the rights to some former Janus titles have reverted), and its other films are prestigious European and American films, both old and new. On the one hand Criterion can release some high rep Suzuki films such as BRANDED TO KILL and TOKYO DRIFTER, while HVE offers up three additional Suzuki titles. HVE is also releasing all the Zatoichi films in order. Meanwhile, Barbet Schroeder's MAITRESSE is a part of the Criterion Collection, while the more famous Schroeder film LA VALLEE arrives via HVE. It seems like it should be the other way around. And let me just add that someone over there at Criterion really, really likes Ronald Neame.
Be that as it may, the home viewer of limited means is grateful for access to Japanese films that might not come his way otherwise. Overall, I would attribute the interest in Japanese films to an impatience, even boredom, with the usually highly touted American action and horror films that kids used to like, which are assumed to be better because of superior production values. In fact, they end up being unnecessarily tame thanks to corporate interference and a form of internalized censorship inspired by the coincidentally combined forces of Blockbuster and the MPAA.
Japanese filmmakers, both of the new younger, speedier generation — which often shoots their films digitally — and of the older generations — which usually toiled for the Japanese equivalents of Republic or Eagle-Lion, making programmers — can both equally surprise the viewer with their bold extreme visions, their unexpected visual techniques, their imaginative sex and violence, and their subversion of various (to Americans, new and different) genres even while they are paradoxically honoring them.
Two by Fukasaku
BLACKMAIL IS MY LIFE
IF YOU WERE YOUNG: RAGE
The late Kinji Fukasaku is known in the West only recently as the director of the cult hit BATTLE ROYALE, but his career stretched back to the '50s, mostly with Toie studios. He directed THE GREEN SLIME and parts of TORA TORA TORA, and therefore in the West was assumed to be something of a hack. Before BATTLE ROYALE Fukasaku was most famous in Japan for his yakuza series BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY, a refreshing update of the traditional yakuza actioner with a realistic visual style using handheld cameras and authentic locations.
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One characteristic that Fukasaku shares with a few other directors, such as early Oshima and Kôhei Oguri is an interest in young people. The young must have been just as puzzling to their elders in Japan as they were to their American equivalents, and Fukasaku's exploration of youth culture is not merely commercial. In BLACKMAIL IS MY LIFE (Kyokatsu koso Waga Jinse), from 1968, he seems to blend the crime story with the Japanese equivalent of a summer drive in teen movie in a tale about a team of amateur blackmailers butting up against a series of pros.
The central character is Muraki (Hiroki Matsukata), a guy who has turned to blackmail, we learn in one of the film's numerous and lengthy flashbacks, after failing to find satisfaction within the conventional workforce. His partners in crime are an ex- Yakuza (do such exist?), a failed boxer named Zero (Akira Jo) and a girl named Otoki (Tomomi Sato) who seems to love Muraki as much as she does crushing the spirit out of her victims. To her distress, Muraki is dating a movie star (Yoko Mihara). At some point the kids get a conscience and their last blackmail scheme is really designed to expose government corruption. They fail, and Muraki is stabbed to death on the streets of the city while a crowd of passersby does nothing.
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Reviewers have noted a Godardian spirit to Fukasaku's criminals, who conduct their enterprises with the carefree spirit of the characters in A BAND APART, but the nuttiness comes across more as fun than as any kind of social protest against repressive adulthood. Unlike Godard's films, however, the characters are taken seriously as subjects in the film, and their deaths are not jokes on cinema conventions, but tragic social statements. Still, there is an element of sociological interest in what makes these people tick, hence the flashbacks. I think that BLACKMAIL is a little more complicated than some of the other reviewers have given it credit for being, but again, most of us are kind of swatting at the films in the dark, having little access to the full careers of these directors, viewing them piecemeal and out of order, much the way the early auteurist critics dealt with the American directors they helped to elevate to the status of artists.
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BLACKMAIL is much more fun and interesting than IF YOU WERE YOUNG: RAGE (Kimi ga wakamono nara), from 1970. In fact, the film is likely to set your teeth on edge, if not drive you to seasickness. It's the tale of five undereducated school friends who join together to buy a garbage truck. Plot complications begin to eat at their once exuberant coherence, as one ends up burdened with a child, another ends up in prison, a third is killed off, and the final two, the main characters of the group, have a falling out. Their exuberance is established with lots of hand held shots of them dancing up and down around the truck, both in real time and in nostalgic memory flashes. But the handheld CinemaScope photography is just as likely to unsettle the stomach (and obscure the action) as anything else. On the other hand, the film comes across as sincere. Fukasaku seems genuinely interested in his kids, and that lays the emotional groundwork for his treatment of the school kids in BATTLE ROYALE.
Both discs come with excellent transfers, excerpts of video interviews with Fukasaku, and four page inserts with essays by Patrick Macias (BLACKMAIL) and Tom Mes (RAGE) that explain the background of Fukasaku's career and the films' immediate contexts. Mes, the author of a big book on Miike, and has what will no doubt be an informative book on contemporary Japanese cinema coming out from Stone Bridge press.
Three by Suzuki
UNDERWORLD BEAUTY
KANTO WANDERER
TATTOOED LIFE
While Fukasaku toiled over at Toei, his slightly older contemporary Seiju Suzuki was at the rival studio Nikkatsu, turning out action films at a vigorous pace. If Fukasaku was, say, the Nicholas Ray of Japanese B cinema, with his sympathy for youth and up to date visual pyrotechnics, than Suzuki was its Allan Dwan, capable of some stunning effects buried deep within what on the surface seemed to be mere potboilers, with effects of an almost surrealistic tone, derived from the influence of Kabuki theater on Suzuki. Anyone who sees TATTOOED LIFE, with its one-man-facing-all climax, or KANTO WANDERER, with its primary color-silhouette effects, knows instantly the source for some of the effects in KILL BILL's climactic battle scene.
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The black and white UNDERWORLD BEAUTY (Ankokugai no Bijo, from 1958) is a great deal of fun. But then you knew it was going to be fun from the poster on the cover, showing a chick in a bikini wielding a machine gun (although the film Suzuki made just before this one sounds even better — Aoi Chibusa, or, YOUNG BREASTS). It's a crazy story about the inevitable yakuza just out of the slammer and a parcel of diamonds that everyone wants. Like many Asian B films the plot as such is really a long, long set up to get to the action filled climax, in this case a shoot-out in the basement of the bad gang's hideout, with coal fires and an oversized space aged Tommy Gun thrown in.
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With his ever present black fedora, his propensity for lying on his bed while waiting for action, and his adherence to a secret code, BEAUTY's main character, played by Michitaro Mizushima (at least, I think that's the actor who plays the part), is very much in the spirit of a Jean-Pierre Melville film, just another coincidence of sensibility that unites the cinemas of the world.
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I couldn't really follow KANTO WANDERER (Kanto mushuku; 1963) too well. It's soap opera story entails a good yakuza trying to maintain the honor of his small, beleaguered family. Among the several impedimental in his path to great glory for the family is a schoolgirl who finds herself drawn to the world of gambling, prostitution, and violence, in a subplot that put me in mind of Shinoda's 1954 PALE FLOWER, also released by HVE. There is also a conflict with a competing family that is causing problems for him. It all culminates in a spectacular battle scene, but otherwise I had a hard time keeping people straight. Also, the narrative goes in for a rather crude and distracting form of lowbrow humor that I couldn't integrate into the rest of the film. Still, some of the codes of the family are intriguing, such as the difference between white clothes and red clothes, red meaning death. I'm not sure if that is something that Suzuki and his writers made up for the film, or is a theme in yakuza films, but it is enough to inspire further research.
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TATTOOED LIFE (Irezumi ichidai), from 1965 (one of three films he did that year, which is characteristic), is almost epical in its story of a yakuza on the run with his delicate artist brother. They end up in a coastal town, working in a mine, building a tunnel for an honest engineering company while waiting to find passage to Manchuria. Like an Edna Ferber novel, the story grows in complexity. A rival company wants to take over the project. One brother falls in love with the boss's wife, the other with her daughter, inciting the jealousies of others. The dense drama builds to a gripping battle scene with the solo yakuza taking his revenge on a huge gang of opponents, mostly felling his foes in a long, single take from overhead.
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It's not entirely clear when TATTOOED LIFE is taking place, and apparently that is a characteristic of Suzuki's films. According to a delightful, teasing interview with Suzuki in Mark Schilling's excellent (though occasionally mildly erroneous) THE YAKUZA MOVIE BOOK, from Stone Bridge press, Suzuki preferred to set his yakuza films in the nebulous (to us) Meiji period (1868 - 1912) before the wars, when yakuza philosophy seems to have been more agreeable to him, though TATTOOED's story seems to be set between the wars.
All three discs bear excellent transfers. The only supplemental material is a filmography shared by all, and the trailer for KANTO WANDERER on that disc. Each box comes with a four page insert with helpful essays by, in order, Tatsu Aoki, Ray Pride, and Tom Mes.
One by Kurosawa … Not That Kurosawa
CURE
The recent trend in Japanese genre films is towards the stately, the serious, the slow paced, and the creepy. I base this on little tangible information, of course, but RINGU certainly fits into this mode. The violence in both RINGU and CURE are heightened by the serenity of what exists around those moments.
CURE begins mysteriously enough with a solitary businessman walking down the teeming streets of a congested Japan before ripping a pipe off a tunnel wall. He later uses it to bludgeon a woman to death (a hooker? It isn't clear). The homicide detective, Takabe (Koji Yakusho) summoned to investigate the case has his own problems, among them a wife with a strange memory disorder. Fans of the late BOOMTOWN may recall the early subplot about the cop's damaged stay-at-home wife, but the concept goes back as far as the Frank Sinatra vehicle derived from the book THE FIRST DEADLY SIN (itself in part a precursor to CRUISING).
The rest of the plot builds creepily and eerily — and somewhat languorously — from that. Then, about halfway through the film it makes a surprise change, answering many of the questions that the plot raises, but also becoming something of an interrogation film in the manner of UNDER SUSPICION and a small handful of other films in that spirit (MORTAL THOUGHTS, CLOSET LAND).
CURE is gripping in its own cerebral, icy way, and the disc comes with a four page insert with an essay by Tom Mes, plus the trailer, and a video interview with the director. Though he has a reputation for being cryptic and mysterious in the Japanese press, he appears to be quite forthcoming about the sources of CURE's mysterious surface life.
NEXT TIME: Numerous STAR TREKS, ROSWELL, John Sayles, and more!
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