Beast Needs Beast

Criterion's release of Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower earlier this year caused at least two instances of confusion that I'm aware of, having to do with the belief that Pale Flower, from 1964, would be something like the crime films Seijun Suzuki would become famous for later that decade. I think the source of this confusion was the use, by Criterion, of the word "jazzy" to describe Shinoda's film. That word does not really evoke Pale Flower, apart from its score, but does put one in mind, or did me and at least one other person, of the fractured New Wave mania of films like Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill. As it happens, my own affinities are closer to what Pale Flower actually turned out to be, and I think that is a pretty terrific movie, so there was no disappointment at play in my case. It did make me think a bit about Suzuki, though, who I don't have a great deal of experience with, as New Wave pop abstract genre hoo-ha is often not my thing. So much so that even Godard's Breathless, as well as even Godard's Band of Outsiders, leave me listless. Crime films once removed, I call them, and it's here that Godard and I begin to part ways. My interests would simply appear to lie elsewhere.

Or do they!? Criterion already released Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill many years ago, but tomorrow they're being re-released, remastered and with gorgeous new covers and so on. Having watched them both (rewatched, in the case of Branded to Kill) I find myself rather stunned. Less so by Tokyo Drifter, I must admit, eye-popping thought it unquestionably is, as you see:

The whole film felt to me like the adaptations of Yukio Mishima's fiction, in all their Brechtian phantasmagoria, within Paul Schrader's Mishima (genre differences aside, Tokyo Drifter must have been a huge influence on Schrader's film). The film's bright, assaultive colors contrast pretty sharply with the black and white of Branded to Kill, which came out three years later, and it's interesting, for me anyway, to consider Suzuki's relationship to the genre in these two films. In his essay for the Criterion re-release Howard Hampton ably notes how little care -- in the sense that it didn't matter to him, by which in turn I mean the absence of its mattering is what interested him, if you follow me -- Suzuki gives to Tokyo Drifter's coherence as a plot, crime or otherwise. But the story, which revolves around Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari), a former Yakuza who has left that world with his boss, Kurata (Ryuki Kita), to whom he is devoted, and Tetsu's legendary skills as a hitman, which trade he plies his trade in a way he believes is an honorable way to protect Kurata from encroaching Yakuza forces, brings to mind elements of the Coens' Miller's Crossing. Ultimately more bitter than that film -- or maybe clear-eyed, as another former Yakuza will eventually try to right Tetsu's naive ship -- Tokyo Drifter nevertheless almost hides that stuff, the criminal psychology, or pathology, or what have you, under some pretty crazy shit. The ending, a gunfight which takes place in a room of stark white, with maybe big yellow doughnut sculptures, is acrobatic -- that one gun-catching move of Tetsu's is pretty slick -- and bloody and more about all that whiteness and that one big spray of red than it is about much else.

"So what?" you might argue, and fair enough. I'm not here to knock Tokyo Drifter. It's just that boy, did I love Branded to Kill, a film I did not remember as being quite this excellent. And it's interesting how much more reserved it is, visually, than Tokyo Drifter, coming in 1967 when the push for most would have been to pull out even those last few remaining stops and let the style all spill out. Instead, nutty as Branded to Kill is in a lot of ways, here Suzuki seems to find more interest in the actual genre, the trappings of which, like the women and the guns (especially the women, though Hanada's (Joe Shisido) machine pistol gets a fair amount of screen time), become more central to Suzuki's visual design. And the violence, too, which is typically more brutal and fast. It's true, though, that both films share a specific theme about the empty and destructive ambition of the Yakuza. In Tokyo Drifter, that particular absurdity is expressed through the notion of honor and loyalty even being possible (it's not, Suzuki says), and in Branded to Kill the question is, if you're in the Yakuza, what does it mean to be the best at what you do?

Joe Shisido's cold-blooded and efficient hitman is ranked as the Number 3 killer. Number 2 is pretty well know, but who is Number 1? He's never been seen, he's a rumor, you can't get to him. It's worth noting her that Patrick MacGoohan's TV series The Prisoner first hit TV screens in 1967, the same year Branded to Kill was released, and while Shisido's hitman may be Number 3, not Number 6, his quest is still for Number 1, the discovery and defeat of Number 1, and Suzuki, very much not a realist (the course of Hanada's life literally depends on the weight of a butterfly) also has voices blaring at Shisido from intercoms, giving him instructions, threatening him, pointing out the foolhardiness of his quest. Put everybody in funny clothes and throw in a giant menacing bubble, and Branded to Kill could almost be set in The Village. Here, what Suzuki hid, due to lack of interest, under layers of color and even slapstick, he plays up and makes the focus: the death-wish inherent in the criminal life. The mysterious and deeply seductive Misako (Annu Mari) even says she wants to die, almost before she's said anything else, and Hanada is almost willing to help her out with that. The sociopathic elements of this relationship are not entirely unlike those at the center of the, I guess, romance in Pale Flower, actually, but the drive for success is much more feverish in Branded to Kill, and more theatrically abstract. And in Pale Flower, at least you could put your finger on the goal -- it was repulsive, but it was concrete, anyway. In Branded to Kill, you can define it, but you couldn't say what achieving it would mean. Tokyo Drifter's brand of absurdity is all in its visuals; in Branded to Kill, the absurdity is in the motivations.

Tetsu in Tokyo Drifter and Hanada in Branded to Kill really are trying to do the same stupid thing, which is to seek worth, even redemption (however they might define that) through the Yakuza. Both men are also both trailed by a theme song, each sounding like the Japanese equivalent of the "lonely wanderer" brand of American folk ballads, except in this case shot through with the fatalism of gangster life. By the end, though, Tetsu keeps drifting, and Hanada has pulled the trigger again and again until he's hitting empty chambers.

One of These Dumb Beasts

For killing a dumb beast -- or a human being, as the rest of us would have it -- Muraki served a mere three years in prison. This still seems a bit much to him, though, as he returns to Tokyo and his former life as a yakuza and gambler for the first time since his release, he doesn't show any hint of outrage or anger. He's more bemused that anyone could think anything might matter so much.

As played by Ryo Ikebe in Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower, Muraki brings to mind Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai. Both are quiet, efficient, seemingly bloodless until something or someone gets that blood flowing again, and even then the change is almost entirely internal. You'd never tell by looking at them that each man had chosen to potentially ruin themselves for the sake of someone else. Of course, the other big difference between the two men is that Muraki ruins himself for reasons that are about as dark and inhuman as one can imagine. Ostensibly, Muraki's fate is tied to Saeko (Mariko Kaga), the mysterious female gambler who catches his eye at the beginning of the film. But what Muraki wants for her is not particularly warming to the soul. Earlier in the film, Muraki and Saeko have a conversation that touches on Muraki's time in prison, and how he felt about killing another person. His explanation is the only clue anybody should need to understand Muraki's fate.

Pale Flower has gotten the Criterion treatment, and will be available tomorrow. I feel, or rather fear, that this will be received as one of their incidental releases, between all the big films or the more immediately popular ones. Already Pale Flower has been bookended on Criterion's schedule by Jonathan Demme's well-loved cult 1980s road comedy Something Wild and Charlie Chaplin's frickin' The Great Dictator, for Pete's sake. I hope that Pale Flower does not get overlooked due to its relative obscurity because I found Shinoda's film to be thoroughly magnificent. The comparisons to Melville, who I idolize, do not stop at Ikebe's characterization and performance. Both in France and Japan, gangster and crime films of those countries' respective New Waves could have something of a post-modern commentary on films-as-films element (see Breathless and Band of Outsiders and Tokyo Drifter), or at least those are the ones that tend to become most famous as the years pass by. But in Pale Flower, Shinoda made a film, as did Melville, repeatedly (and Shinoda's entirely not post-modern countryman Akira Kurosawa with Stray Dog and High and Low and so on), that is not only amazingly assured and quietly stylish, but actually about its world and its people, the gamblers and killers, and the bosses who join forces and eat lunch in big empty rooms while discussing their families and their weight, and the fate of their men.

Pale Flower is very pure in its noir motives, more pure, even, than many of the American films that influenced it. Some of the classic noirs -- though by no means all -- had a tendency to pull back not only on certain implications about their characters, but about the very doom the rest of the film seems to be portending. Films like Gun Crazy and Angel Face and Scarlet Street are so bracing in part because of the films in the genre that don't go so far. Pale Flower, meanwhile, does go that far, and is so weary about it. Muraki knows who he is and what he's capable of, but instead of either fleeing his nature in terror, or maniacally embracing it, his attitude is one of morbid acceptance. He may not be thrilled about this, but he knows better than to fight it.

And of course it's all due to Saeko, the woman, the laughing, happy gambler who fills all the gambling halls to which Muraki takes her with a new energy that the slumped and blank-faced men who essentially inhabit those places haven't felt in a very long time. But no one feels it like Muraki, and no one is willing to follow that energy quite so doggedly as Muraki, either. Or maybe they would, if only they could. It's not so much that either only has eyes for the other; it's more that they were built for this. The fact that circumstances and a certain lack of enthusiasm on Muraki's part is able to contain their behavior and fates to the world of organized crime can only be regarded by the rest of us as very fortunate.